Drosophila CG11700 may not affect male fecundity-lifespan tradeoff as previously reported

Our recent investigations on the function of Drosophila CG11700 and CG32744 (Ubi-p5E) genes using CRISPR/Cas9 deletion technology could not repeat or confirm the results on CG11700 shown in our previous study, which was based on P-element excision assay (Zhan Z, Ding Y, Zhao R, Zhang Y, Yu H, Zhou Q, Yang S, Xiang H, Wang W. Rapid functional divergence of a newly evolved polyubiquitin gene in Drosophila and its role in the trade-off between male fecundity and lifespan. Mol Biol Evol. 2012:29(5):1407–1416. doi:10.1093/molbev/msr299). Here, by CRISPR/ Cas9 editing, we generated mutants of CG32744 with the whole gene body fully deleted from the genome, and truncated mutants of CG11700 with N-terminal 103 aa deleted out of its total 301 aa peptide sequence. We carefully conducted the male fecundity assay and found that offsprings of the CG11700 mutant were not significantly more than the wild type, inconsistent with our previous report (Zhan et al. 2012). Meanwhile, we repeated the lifespan assay and did not find that the lifespan of the CG11700 mutant was significantly shorter than the wild type as reported (2012). The new results suggest that the CG11700 gene may not affect male fecundity-lifespan tradeoff as previously reported (Zhan et al. 2012). The new results are thus worthy of reporting to avoid possible misleading by the previous results to the scientific community.