High genetic differentiation between an African and a non-African strain of Drosophila simulans revealed by segregation distortion and reduced crossover frequency

Drosophila simulans strains originating from Madagascar and nearby islands in the Indian Ocean often differ from those elsewhere in the number of sex comb teeth and the degree of morphological anomaly in hybrids with D. melanogaster. Here, we report a strong segregation distortion in the F1 intercross between two D. simulans strains originating from Madagascar and the US, possibly at both the gametic and zygotic levels. Strong bias against alleles of the Madagascar strain was observed for all ten marker loci distributed over the entire second chromosome in the F1 intercross, but only a few showed a weak distortion in the isogenic backgrounds of either strains. Significant deviations of genotype frequencies from Hardy-Weinberg proportions were consistently observed for the second chromosome. By contrast, the X and third chromosomes did not show any strong segregation distortion. Crossover frequency on the second chromosome was uniformly reduced in isogenic backgrounds whereas the map lengths in the F1 intercross were comparable to or larger than that of the standard D. melanogaster map. We discuss these findings in relation to previous studies on other traits and interspecific differences between D. mauritiana, which is endemic to Mauritius Island, and D. simulans.