Experimental and statistical reevaluation provides no evidence for courtship song rhythms.

TitleExperimental and statistical reevaluation provides no evidence for courtship song rhythms.
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2017
AuthorsStern, DL, Clemens, J, Coen, P, Calhoun, AJ, Hogenesch, JB, Arthur, BJ, Murthy, M
JournalProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
Volume114
Issue37
Pagination9978-9983
Date Published2017 Sep 12
ISSN1091-6490
KeywordsAnimals, Courtship, Drosophila, Drosophila melanogaster, Drosophila Proteins, Female, Male, Sexual Behavior, Animal, Singing, Vocalization, Animal
Abstract

<p>From 1980 to 1992, a series of influential papers reported on the discovery, genetics, and evolution of a periodic cycling of the interval between male courtship song pulses. The molecular mechanisms underlying this periodicity were never described. To reinitiate investigation of this phenomenon, we previously performed automated segmentation of songs but failed to detect the proposed rhythm [Arthur BJ, et al. (2013) 11:11; Stern DL (2014) 12:38]. Kyriacou et al. [Kyriacou CP, et al. (2017) 114:1970-1975] report that we failed to detect song rhythms because () our flies did not sing enough and () our segmenter did not identify many of the song pulses. Kyriacou et al. manually annotated a subset of our recordings and reported that two strains displayed rhythms with genotype-specific periodicity, in agreement with their original reports. We cannot replicate this finding and show that the manually annotated data, the original automatically segmented data, and a new dataset provide no evidence for either the existence of song rhythms or song periodicity differences between genotypes. Furthermore, we have reexamined our methods and analysis and find that our automated segmentation method was not biased to prevent detection of putative song periodicity. We conclude that there is no evidence for the existence of courtship song rhythms.</p>

DOI10.1073/pnas.1707471114
Alternate JournalProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
PubMed ID28851830
PubMed Central IDPMC5604024
Grant ListDP2 NS092378 / NS / NINDS NIH HHS / United States
/ HHMI / Howard Hughes Medical Institute / United States