Data from: Experimental and statistical reevaluation provides no evidence for Drosophila courtship song rhythms

From 1980 to 1992, a series of influential papers reported on the discovery, genetics, and evolution of a periodic cycling of the interval between Drosophila 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) BMC Biol 11:11; Stern DL (2014) BMC Biol 12:38]. Kyriacou et al. [Kyriacou CP, et al. (2017) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 114:1970–1975] report that we failed to detect song rhythms because (i) our flies did not sing enough and (ii) 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 Drosophila courtship song rhythms.

1980年至1992年间，一系列具有影响力的论文报道了果蝇（Drosophila）雄性求偶歌曲脉冲（courtship song pulses）间隔周期性循环现象的发现、遗传学基础与演化规律，但该周期性背后的分子机制始终未被阐明。为重新启动对该现象的研究，我们此前曾对果蝇歌曲信号开展自动分割（automated segmentation）处理，但未能检测到所提出的节律[Arthur BJ等（2013）BMC Biol 11:11；Stern DL（2014）BMC Biol 12:38]。Kyriacou等人[Kyriacou CP等（2017）Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 114:1970–1975]指出，我们未能检测到歌曲节律的原因在于两点：其一，我们的果蝇样本鸣叫频次不足；其二，我们的分割算法未能识别出多数歌曲脉冲。Kyriacou等人手动注释了我们的部分录音数据集，并报道称有两个果蝇品系展现出具有基因型特异性周期的节律，这与他们最初的研究结果一致。但我们无法复现这一发现，且研究证实，手动注释数据集、原始自动分割得到的数据集以及新构建的数据集，均未提供任何证据支持果蝇求偶歌曲节律的存在，亦未证明不同基因型果蝇间存在歌曲周期性差异。此外，我们重新审视了研究方法与分析流程，发现此前的自动分割方法并未存在检测偏向性，不会阻碍推定的歌曲周期性的识别。综上，我们认为目前尚无证据支持果蝇求偶歌曲节律的存在。