Expression data from adult Drosophila melanogaster virgin males

We used microarrays to investigate the transcriptome of male flies exposed to either a rich or a poor nutrient environment during development. Further we investigated transcriptome of their offspring and grand-offspring also developed at poor or rich diet. The ability of organisms to cope with poor quality nutrition is essential for their persistence. For species with short generation time, the nutritional environments can transcend generations, making it beneficial for adults to prime their offspring to particular diets. However, our understanding of potential adaptive generational effects, including those of diet quality, is still very limited. Here we use the vinegar fly, Drosophila melanogaster, to investigate if females developing as larvae on a nutritionally poor diet produce offspring that are primed for nutrient deficiencies in the following generations. We found that females developed at low quality diets produced offspring, which at similarly low-quality diets had both increased egg-to-adult viability and starvation tolerance compared to females experiencing a nutrient rich diet in the previous generation. When testing the persistence of such generational priming, we found that just one generation of high-quality diet is sufficient to return performance to initial levels. A global transcriptomic profile analysis suggests that the observed phenotypic priming is not a constitutive transcriptomic adjustment, instead offspring appear primed to initiate an adaptive response only when exposed to low quality diets. Our results show that generational priming is likely an important adaptive mechanism of coping with transient nutritional fluctuations. Ten experimental groups were analysed in triplicate, in total 30 Affymetrix Drosophila Gene 1.0 arrays