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学术论文报道了果蝇（Drosophila）雄性求偶歌脉冲间隔周期性循环现象的发现、遗传学基础及演化历程，但该周期性现象背后的分子机制始终未被阐明。为重启针对该现象的研究，我们此前曾对果蝇求偶歌进行自动分割处理，但未能检测到此前文献报道的节律[Arthur BJ等人(2013) BMC Biol 11:11；Stern DL(2014) BMC Biol 12:38]。Kyriacou等人[Kyriacou CP等人(2017) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 114:1970–1975]指出，我们未能检测到歌节律的原因在于两点：其一，实验所用果蝇的鸣叫频次不足；其二，我们所使用的自动分割工具未能识别出多数求偶歌脉冲。Kyriacou等人对我们的部分原始录音样本进行了手动注释，并宣称有两个果蝇品系展现出具有基因型特异性的节律，这与他们最初的研究结论一致。但我们无法重复该实验发现，并证实：无论是手动注释得到的数据、此前的自动分割数据集，还是新构建的实验数据集，均未提供任何证据支持果蝇求偶歌节律的存在，亦未证明不同基因型间存在求偶歌周期性差异。此外，我们重新审视了自身的实验方法与分析流程，发现此前采用的自动分割方法并未存在偏倚，不会干扰对假定的求偶歌周期性的检测。综上，目前尚无证据表明果蝇求偶歌节律的存在。