A suite of selective pressures supports the maintenance of alleles of a Drosophila immune peptide

The innate immune system provides hosts with a crucial first line of defense against pathogens. While immune genes are often among the fastest evolving genes in the genome, in Drosophila, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are notable exceptions. Instead, AMPs may be under balancing selection, such that over evolutionary timescales multiple alleles are maintained in populations. In this study, we focus on the Drosophila antimicrobial peptide Diptericin A, which has a segregating amino acid polymorphism associated with differential survival after infection with the Gram-negative bacteria Providencia rettgeri. Diptericin A also helps control opportunistic gut infections by common Drosophila gut microbes, especially those of Lactobacillus plantarum. In addition to genotypic effects on gut immunity, we also see strong sex-specific effects that are most prominent in flies without functional diptericin A. To further characterize differences in microbiomes between different diptericin genotypes, we..., , # README for Mullinax *et al.* 2025 \"A suite of selective pressures supports the maintenance of alleles of a Drosophila immune peptide\" ## Figure 1 (Fig1\_data.csv) This is survival data for several genotypes after infection with several different pathogens. The columns are: | Title | Explanation | | ------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Vial\_number | bookkeeping purposes and these values repeat so are not useful | | line | The Diptericin CRISPR/Cas9 edited stock (or other genotype) | | genotype | Specific edits to the Diptericin (or Imd) gene | | treatment | Microbes used for infection (see manuscript text for abbreviations or media below) | | start\_date | Date infection started (YYYYMMDD) | | day0-day5 | number of flies alive on each day ...,