ArticleCurrent biology : CB2016
Evidence that Environmental Heterogeneity Maintains a Detoxifying Enzyme Polymorphism in Drosophila melanogaster.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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17 citing papers in PubMed, 34 citations in OpenAlex.
- A century of theories of balancing selection.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Local negative frequency dependence can decrease global coexistence in fragmented populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- From Natural Behavior to Drug Screening: Invertebrates as Models to Study Mechanisms Associated with Alcohol Use Disorders.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- Balancing selection and candidate loci for survival and growth during larval development in the Mediterranean mussel, Mytilus galloprovincialis.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2023Article
- Inferring Balancing Selection From Genome-Scale Data.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Review
- Evolved Transcriptional Responses and Their Trade-Offs after Long-Term Adaptation of Bemisia tabaci to a Marginally Suitable Host.Genome biology and evolution · 2022Article
- Ethanol resistance inEcology and evolution · 2021Article
- Temporally balanced selection during development of larval Pacific oysters (Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Allelic polymorphism at foxo contributes to local adaptation in Drosophila melanogaster.Molecular ecology · 2021Article
- Fine-scale habitat heterogeneity favours the coexistence of supergene-controlled social forms in Formica selysi.BMC ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Fitness effects but no temperature-mediated balancing selection at the polymorphicProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- When one phenotype is not enough: divergent evolutionary trajectories govern venom variation in a widespread rattlesnake species.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Extreme copy number variation at a tRNA ligase gene affecting phenology and fitness in yellow monkeyflowers.Molecular ecology · 2019Article
- Dynamic changes in gene expression and alternative splicing mediate the response to acute alcohol exposure in Drosophila melanogaster.Heredity · 2018Article
- Conservation of social effects (ΨEcology and evolution · 2017Article
- Long-term balancing selection contributes to adaptation in Arabidopsis and its relatives.Genome biology · 2017Article
- A genomic perspective on the generation and maintenance of genetic diversity in herbivorous insects.Annual review of ecology, evolution, and systematics · 2016Article
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Abstract
Environmental heterogeneity is thought to be an important process maintaining genetic variation in populations [1-4]: if alternative alleles are favored in different environments, a stable polymorphism can be maintained [1, 5, 6]. This situation has been hypothesized to occur in genes encoding multi-substrate enzymes [7], in which changes that increase activity with one substrate typically decrease activity with others [8-10], but examples of polymorphisms maintained by this mechanism are rare. Here, we present evidence that a polymorphism in an enzyme gene in Drosophila melanogaster is maintained by such a trade-off. The mitochondrially localized aldehyde dehydrogenase in D. melanogaster has two important functions: detoxifying acetaldehyde derived from dietary ethanol [11] and detoxifying larger aldehydes produced as byproducts of oxidative phosphorylation [12]. A derived variant of the enzyme, Leu479Phe, is present in moderate frequencies in most temperate populations but is rare in more ethanol-averse tropical populations. Using purified recombinant protein, we show that the Leu-Phe substitution increases turnover rate of acetaldehyde but decreases turnover rate of larger aldehydes. Furthermore, using transgenic fly lines, we show that the substitution increases lifetime fitness on medium supplemented with an ecologically relevant ethanol concentration but decreases fitness on medium lacking ethanol. The strong, opposing selection pressures, coupled with documented highly variable ethanol concentrations in breeding sites of temperate populations, implicate an essential role for environmental heterogeneity in maintaining the polymorphism.
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