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，一系列具有影响力的论文报道了果蝇（Drosophila）雄性求偶歌曲脉冲间隔周期性循环现象的发现、遗传学特征与演化历程，但该周期性背后的分子机制始终未被阐释。为重新启动对该现象的研究，我们此前曾对果蝇求偶歌曲开展自动信号分割处理，但未能检测到此前报道的节律特征[Arthur BJ等(2013) 《BMC生物学》11:11；Stern DL(2014) 《BMC生物学》12:38]。Kyriacou等人[Kyriacou CP等(2017) 《美国国家科学院院刊》114:1970–1975]指出，我们未能检测到歌曲节律的原因有二：其一，我们的果蝇鸣叫频次不足；其二，我们的分割算法未能识别出大量歌曲脉冲。Kyriacou等人手动标注了我们的部分录音数据，并报道称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相符。但我们无法复现这一发现，且证明：无论是手动标注数据集、此前的自动分割数据集，还是新构建的数据集，均未提供证据支持果蝇求偶歌曲节律的存在，亦未证明不同基因型间存在歌曲周期性差异。此外，我们重新审视了自身的实验方法与分析流程，发现我们的自动分割算法并未存在偏倚，不会干扰对推定的歌曲周期性的检测。综上，目前尚无证据表明果蝇求偶歌曲节律的存在。