A Novel System of Fertility Rescue in Drosophila Hybrids Reveals a Link Between Hybrid Lethality and Female Sterility

Hybrid daughters of crosses between Drosophila melanogaster females and males from the D. simulans species clade are fully viable at low temperature but have agametic ovaries and are thus sterile. We report here that mutations in the D. melanogaster gene Hybrid male rescue (Hmr), along with unidentified polymorphic factors, rescue this agametic phenotype in both D. melanogaster/D. simulans and D. melanogaster/D. mauritiana F1 female hybrids. These hybrids produced small numbers of progeny in backcrosses, their low fecundity being caused by incomplete rescue of oogenesis as well as by zygotic lethality. F1 hybrid males from these crosses remained fully sterile. Hmr+ is the first Drosophila gene shown to cause hybrid female sterility. These results also suggest that, while there is some common genetic basis to hybrid lethality and female sterility in D. melanogaster, hybrid females are more sensitive to fertility defects than to lethality.