A temperature-dependent shift in dietary preference expands the viable temperature range of Drosophila

At low temperature, Drosophila reared on food composed of plants survive better than those reared on yeast. Plant food allows Drosophila to increase membrane fluidity when temperature drops. To understand how diet and temperature affect membrane fluidity, we performed shotgun lipidomics on Drosophila larvae (minus the gut) raised at 10, 13, 20 and 30 ˚C. This dataset includes all the measurements from these experiments. These data show that flies require plant-derived lipids to accumulate significant amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acids in membrane lipids, and to tune fatty acid unsaturation in response to temperature. They also reveal other temperature-dependent lipidomic changes that occur independently of diet. For example, flies increase the ratio of PE to PC as temperature drops. All values are expressed in pmol/individual and for each condition biological triplicates were measured as technical duplicates so for each temperature and food condition there are in total 6 measurements. The data is separated into three individual excel sheets dealing with lipid classes, sterol and lipid species composition.