Parental Effects of Pathogenic Bacterial Infections in Drosophila melanogaster

Transgenerational effects of parental infection enhance offspring survival and disease resistance in fruit flies. The dataset likely contains experimental results from infecting Drosophila melanogaster parents with live, pathogenic bacteria and measuring offspring outcomes. It was contributed by Nagaraj Guru Prasad to Harvard Dataverse and last updated in May 2026.

Use Cases

• Modeling transgenerational immune priming based on parental infection status.
• Analyzing trade-offs between disease resistance and reproductive output based on phenotypic changes.
• Investigating cross-protection against pathogens based on heterologous infection challenges.
• Studying the heritability of plastic phenotypic changes in response to biotic stress.

Strengths

• Experimental design tests both homologous and heterologous bacterial infection challenges.
• Measures multiple fitness outcomes: offspring survival, systemic pathogen proliferation, and reproductive output.
• Findings are based on controlled infection with two distinct bacterial pathogens.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect experimental bias inherent to laboratory studies of model organisms.

Provenance

Source

Harvard Dataverse

Collection Method

Likely contains experimental data from controlled laboratory infections of Drosophila melanogaster.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-18 17:53:47; freshness should be verified.