Pervasive suppressors halt the spread of selfish Segregation Distorter in a natural population

Meiotic drivers are selfish genetic elements that subvert Mendelian inheritance to increase their own transmission, yet they are typically found at low frequencies across natural populations. The factors that limit their spread remain unclear. To investigate this paradox, we studied the Segregation Distorter (SD) system, a selfish coadapted gene complex in Drosophila melanogaster. SD biases its transmission by killing sperm carrying a homologous chromosome bearing a target locus, Responder (Rsp), which appear as satellite repeats. Such selfish killing impairs male fertility and imposes selective pressure on the host genome to evolve resistance, either by deleting Rsp copies or acquiring unlinked suppressors. To characterize the spectrum of Rsp alleles and the frequency of segregating suppressors, we surveyed 90 strains from the Drosophila Genome Reference Panel. Rather than loss of Rsp, we found that over half of the strains (52/90) harbor suppressors located on the X chromosome or autosomes, but not the Y chromosome. The widespread presence of strong suppressors limited the resolution of our genome-wide association mapping; however, recombination analysis identified a strong X-linked suppressor to a ~300 kb interval on the chromosome. Together, our findings suggest that pervasive, multilocus suppression constrains the spread of SD in natural populations.