FIGURE 3.

Lifespan determinations of cohorts of female adult D. melanogaster. Day 0 marks eclosion, flies were kept with the opposite sex for the first five days, then they were separated on groups of 20 and transferred to fresh food regularly. (A) The same genotypes assayed in Figure 1 for behavior were used here. The experiments were performed three times independently (each time with a minimum cohort of 120 flies per genotype) and standard deviations are shown between the three experiments. Note the early onset of mortality in the flies overexpressing ferritin from the X-chromosomal recombinant. (B) A similar single experiment demonstrating that a maternal component determines the early onset mortality. Note that the same genotypes have markedly different lifespans, whose length is predicted by the mothers used for the crosses (see text for details). Overexpression of ferritin was never seen to have a beneficial effect on lifespan.