Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

Locomotor activity is one of the major traits that is affected by age. Greater locomotor activity is also known to evolve in the course of dispersal evolution. However, the fate of evolved locomotor activity in absence of selection pressure for dispersal over several generations and the impact of dispersal evolution on the functional senescence of locomotor activity are unknown. We addressed these knowledge gaps using large outbred populations of Drosophila melanogaster, which evolved greater locomotor activity in their early life as a correlated response to early life selection for increased dispersal. For this, we maintained the selected and ancestry-matched control populations under identical conditions for nine generations in absence of dispersal selection. Subsequently, we tracked locomotor activity of individual flies of both sexes at regular intervals until a late age. Longevity of these flies was also recorded. Interestingly, we found that locomotor activity declines with age in general, but activity level of dispersal selected populations never drops below the controls. More importantly, the rate of age-dependent decline in activity of the dispersal selected population was found to be much larger; while the two sexes perform similarly with respect to the ageing profile of activity. Dispersal selected populations were also found to have a shorter lifespan as compared to the control, a potential cost of elevated level of activity throughout their life. These results are crucial in the context of invasion biology as contemporary climate change, habitat degradation and destruction provide congenial conditions for dispersal evolution. Such controlled and tractable studies investigating the ageing pattern of important functional traits are important in the field of biogerontology as well, which looks into improving the biological quality of life during late-life by postponing the onset of senescence.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.

World University root node

Department of Biology

bioRxiv

Selection for greater dispersal in early life leads to faster age-dependent decline in locomotor activity and shorter lifespan

Fulltext

The American Naturalist

Desiccation stress acts as cause as well as cost of dispersal in Drosophila melanogaster

Spontaneous whole-genome duplication, or autodiploidization, is a common route to adaptation in experimental evolution of haploid budding yeast populations. The rate at which autodiploids fix in these populations appears to vary across strain backgrounds, but the genetic basis of these differences remains poorly characterized. Here, we show that the frequency of autodiploidization differs dramatically between two closely related laboratory strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, BY4741 and W303. To investigate the genetic basis of this difference, we crossed these strains to generate hundreds of unique F1 segregants and tested the tendency of each segregant to autodiplodize across hundreds of generations of laboratory evolution. We find that variants in the SSD1 gene are the primary genetic determinant of differences in autodiploidization. We then used multiple laboratory and wild strains of S. cerevisiae to show that clonal populations of strains with a functional copy of SSD1 autodiploidize more frequently in evolution experiments, while knocking out this gene or replacing it with the W303 allele reduces autodiploidization propensity across all genetic backgrounds tested. These results suggest a potential strategy for modifying rates of spontaneous whole-genome duplications in laboratory evolution experiments in haploid budding yeast. They may also have relevance to other settings in which eukaryotic genome stability plays an important role, such as biomanufacturing and the treatment of pathogenic fungal diseases and cancers.