Document Type
Article
Original Publication Date
2009
Journal/Book/Conference Title
BMC Biology
Volume
7
DOI of Original Publication
10.1186/1741-7007-7-29
Date of Submission
August 2014
Abstract
Background Aggressive behavior in animals is important for survival and reproduction. Identifying the underlying genes and environmental contexts that affect aggressive behavior is important for understanding the evolutionary forces that maintain variation for aggressive behavior in natural populations, and to develop therapeutic interventions to modulate extreme levels of aggressive behavior in humans. While the role of neurotransmitters and a few other molecules in mediating and modulating levels of aggression is well established, it is likely that many additional genetic pathways remain undiscovered. Drosophila melanogaster has recently been established as an excellent model organism for studying the genetic basis of aggressive behavior. Here, we present the results of a screen of 170 Drosophila P-element insertional mutations for quantitative differences in aggressive behavior from their co-isogenic control line.
Results We identified 59 mutations in 57 genes that affect aggressive behavior, none of which had been previously implicated to affect aggression. Thirty-two of these mutants exhibited increased aggression, while 27 lines were less aggressive than the control. Many of the genes affect the development and function of the nervous system, and are thus plausibly relevant to the execution of complex behaviors. Others affect basic cellular and metabolic processes, or are mutations in computationally predicted genes for which aggressive behavior is the first biological annotation. Most of the mutations had pleiotropic effects on other complex traits. We characterized nine of these mutations in greater detail by assessing transcript levels throughout development, morphological changes in the mushroom bodies, and restoration of control levels of aggression in revertant alleles. All of the P-element insertions affected the tagged genes, and had pleiotropic effects on brain morphology.
Conclusion This study reveals that many more genes than previously suspected affect aggressive behavior, and that these genes have widespread pleiotropic effects. Given the conservation of aggressive behavior among different animal species, these are novel candidate genes for future study in other animals, including humans.
Rights
© 2009 Edwards et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Is Part Of
VCU Psychiatry Publications
Mean aggression scores (MAS) of 170 P{GT1} insert lines. This file shows the results of the screen of 170 P-element insert lines for alterations in aggressive behavior, the genes tagged by the P-elements, the mean aggression scores and effects, and gene ontology information.
1741-7007-7-29-s2.xls (34 kB)
Human diseases associated with P{GT1} insertions in Drosophila genes with aberrant aggressive behavior. This file shows the P-element insert lines with altered aggressive behavior, their mean aggression scores, and diseases in which the human orthologues of the tagged genes have been implicated.
Comments
Originally published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1741-7007-7-29