ESTIMATION OF FITNESS COMPONENTS IN DROSOPHILA MELANOGASTER . I. HETEROZYGOTE VIABILITY INDICES

Alan J. Katz ¹ and Ricardo A. Cardellino ²

¹ Department of Biological Sciences, Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois 61761
² Department of Genetics and Cell Biology, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, Minnesota 55108

We examine the assumption of "dominance" with regard to viability of the Cy and Pm marker chromosomes in D. melanogaster . This assumption is often invoked for the extraction of wild-type second chromosomes from natural populations and for the calculation of relative viability indices. Significant genotypic variances for viability are found among both Cy/+_j and Pm/+_i heterozygotes in California and Japanese populations. The magnitude of the Pm/+ _i genotypic variance is substantially less than that of the Cy/+_j heterozygotes (less than one half). Significant reciprocal effects are also found to influence Cy/+_j, Pm/+_i and +_i/+_j viabilities. We conclude that viability indices of heterozygotes based on the Curly method are biased. We suggest that viability indices in the future be expressed relative to the viability of the Cy/Pm genotype (Curly-Plum method) or possibly that of the Pm/+_i genotype (Plum method).