Lamarckian inheritance following sensorimotor training and its neural basis in Drosophila

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that sensorimotor training in Drosophila parents can influence offspring behavior, revealing a neural basis for potential Lamarckian inheritance of acquired traits through specific neural pathways.

Contribution

It provides evidence for transgenerational inheritance of sensorimotor traits in Drosophila and identifies neural mechanisms involved in this process.

Findings

Offspring of trained parents show enhanced odor response bias.

Disruption of olfactory receptor and specific neurons abolishes inherited response.

Mushroom body output disruption has little effect on inherited behavior.

Abstract

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was among first to suggest that certain acquired traits may be heritable from parents to offspring. In this study, I examine whether and what aspects of sensorimotor conditioning by parents prior to conception may influence the behavior of subsequent generations in Drosophila. Using genetic and anatomic techniques, I find that both first- and second-generation offspring of parents who underwent prolonged olfactory training over multiple days displayed a distinct response bias to the same specific trained odors. The offspring displayed an enhanced anemotactic approach response to the trained odors, however, and did not differentiate between orders based on whether parental training was aversive or appetitive. Consequently, disruption of both olfactory-receptor and dorsal-paired-medial neuron input into the mushroom bodies abolished this change in offspring response, but disrupting synaptic output from a/b neurons of the mushroom body themselves had little effect on behavior even though they remained necessary for enacting newly trained conditioned responses. These observations identify a unique transgenerational dissociation between parentally-trained conditioned and unconditioned sensory stimuli, and provide a putative neural basis for how sensorimotor experiences in insects may bias the behavior of subsequent generations.