Absence of Mothers Curse for performance traits among divergent mtDNAs in heterozygous nuclear backgrounds in Drosophila
David M. Rand, Faye A. Lemieux, Kenneth M. Bradley, Lindsay Marmor, Leah J. Darwin, Yevgeniy Raynes
The paper tests the Mothers Curse hypothesis by comparing mtDNA effects on performance traits in Drosophila across different nuclear backgrounds, finding greater phenotypic variation in females than males, contrary to the hypothesis.
bioRxiv · Dec 18, 2025 · PreprintEvolutionary Biology