Absence of Mothers Curse for performance traits among divergent mtDNAs in heterozygous nuclear backgrounds in Drosophila

Maternal inheritance allows selection to act on mtDNA-encoded effects in females but prevents direct selection on mtDNA in males. Mutations that are deleterious in males but neutral or beneficial in females can persist in populations. This predicts that mtDNA-based phenotypic variation should be more common among males than among females, a pattern referred to as Mothers Curse (MC). Most studies of MC place alternative mtDNAs on common homozygous nuclear chromosomal backgrounds, a condition not common in nature. Moreover, it is not known whether MC effects accumulate as mtDNAs acquire nucleotide substitutions between populations or species. We tested the MC hypothesis using mtDNAs from Drosophila melanogaster (OreR, Zimbabwe or w1118), D. simulans (siI and siII) and D. yakuba each placed on several D. melanogaster nuclear backgrounds heterozygous for different chromosomal deficiencies paired with a common w1118 chromosome set. Females and males were tested for starvation resistance, climbing speed, and flight performance. In the majority of chromosomal backgrounds the variance among mtDNA genotypes was greater in females than in males, opposite from the central prediction of Mothers Curse. This suggests that additive and dominance variation across the nuclear genome may provide nuclear blessings that can counter the curse of maternally inherited mtDNA. Teaser textMothers Curse (MC) posits that selection on mtDNA should be stronger in females than in males due to maternal inheritance of mtDNA. This predicts that phenotypic variation among mtDNA genotypes should be lower for females and higher for males. There is conflicting experimental evidence for MC. Most studies of MC have used a common, homozygous nuclear background and have not explored the influence of divergent mtDNAs as strong predictors of MC effects. We address both issues by assaying performance traits among mtDNAs of varying levels of divergence on heterozygous backgrounds. The data fail to support the MC hypothesis and even reveal the opposite effect that females have greater phenotypic variation across mtDNAs. MC may operate in some contexts, but it is not a consistent force in evolutionary genetics.