What role do genes play in each parallel world?

Houston-(June 7, 2021)-If the same version of 20 people lives in dozens of different worlds, will the same people be popular in every world?

If you replace the “person” in this question with “fruit flies,” you give a fair description of a Rice University study that shows the evolution of social structures and the status of individuals in these structures.

The cloned fruit flies played an important role in this research, and the researchers jokingly compared this study to "Trumen's World", which uses a camera to observe the behavior of fruit flies in a controlled environment

In the study published this week on the Nature Communications website, the biological scientists Eric Wice and Julia Saltz of Rice University measured 98 Social interactions between individuals in a group of genetically identical fruit flies

Weiss and Salz found that in each closed "world", the same clone occupies the same social status, regardless of changes in living conditions

"In the animal world, the social structure changes tremendously, and a big question we are interested in is'how does this change evolve?'" said Salz, an associate professor of biological sciences at Rice University

Weiss, a PhD student in the Salz laboratory, said that although genetic variation only explains part of the changes in the social network of flies, the heritability he and Salz have discovered is estimated to be sufficient to promote evolutionary changes

"We know whether the structure of social groups and network structures develop over time, we must know how individuals' genetic basis is nested in their social networks, and we must also know how natural selection acts on the structure of social groups," That said

Weiss said that previous studies have shown that the structure of social networks can evolve through natural selection, but few genetically composed social network structures have been described

Weiss said: "We combine these things at the same time to see how the structure of social groups will evolve and how it might respond to choices

Weiss said that the study found that the difference in social status explained by genes was "approximately between 2.

Salz said that some studies have explored whether human popularity can also be partially explained by genetic factors

"The best way is to get identical twins and shoot "Truman Show"," she said

Essentially, this is the experiment she and Wice did with flies

"Any two genotypes in our sample are genetically closely related to two randomly selected people," Weiss said

Since Wes collects social interaction data by photographing the flies in each cage, conducting this experiment is like making 98 Truman shows at the same time, but "There are 20 Trumans in each show," Wes said

Based on thousands of interactions between flies, the researchers measured their position in social networks in five ways

It is worth noting that Weiss and Salz found that even if the environment is changed by changing the quality of food in the paddock, their social status in the paddock network remains the same
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Some foods contain more protein, and some foods contain more carbohydrates
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In other cases, the flies have fewer available calories
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There are five kinds of food in total, each of which contains about 20 groups of flies
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"Our results show that we expect that the social structure will evolve in different ways in different nutritional environments," Weiss said
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"This is important, but further research is needed to determine what changes the nutritional differences will bring
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Finally, Weiss and Salz want to learn more about the ways in which nutrition, aggressive behavior, and other factors influence the evolution of social structure
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"What creates the social structure?" Schaltz said
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"Group structure is the inherent emergent attribute of many different individuals, and there must be some basic principles that have shaped the evolution of these structures
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The fact that a person’s position in the social network depends on the behavior of other individuals complicates the study of evolutionary social structure.
Weiss said that he noticed that when Weiss started his PhD study five years ago, they were analyzing Some tools used do not yet exist
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"This is not independent data, which violates a lot of statistical tests and assumptions," Weiss said
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"These tools are constantly improving, and I wouldn't be surprised if new tools emerge in the next five years that allow us to learn more from the data collected so far
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This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (1856577), a Rosemary grant from the Society for Evolutionary Research and the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo
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10.
1038/s41467-021-23672-1

https://doi.
org/10.
1038/s41467-021-23672-1

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be/ zi9atHy5vv8