The impact of paternal age and nutrition on offspring fitness

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Mothers have long been known to influence their offspring's condition in many ways other than just transmitting genes. Less obvious is that the condition and environment of fathers can affect their sperm and, as a result, the quality of their offspring. Poor paternal diet is now thought to cause metabolic disorders in offspring, and advanced paternal age may harm offspring brain development. However, we still know little about the causes and consequences of such effects. A major barrier to progress is that these effects are challenging to study in humans and other mammals. To overcome this barrier and push the field forward, I plan to make use of one of the major alternative models for understanding animal evolution and physiology, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.The fruit fly is already a major model system for studies of ageing, diet and neurobiology. It has a short lifespan; it is simple and genetically well characterized. These make the fruit fly ideal for experimental study and the study of both evolutionary (why) and mechanistic (how) questions. With the fruit fly, I will tackle three of the major open questions in the study of paternal effects: 1) Why do they occur? 2) How do they impact offspring? and finally 3) What causes them? At the University of Oxford, I will combine large-scale evolutionary experiments with cutting-edge molecular methods and establish a major new research program to understand all aspects of these important and fascinating effects.