Evidence that Environmental Heterogeneity Maintains a Detoxifying Enzyme Polymorphism in Drosophila melanogaster.

ABSTRACT: Environmental heterogeneity is thought to be an important process maintaining genetic variation in populations [1-4]: if alternative alleles are favored in different environments, a stable polymorphism can be maintained [1, 5, 6]. This situation has been hypothesized to occur in genes encoding multi-substrate enzymes [7], in which changes that increase activity with one substrate typically decrease activity with others [8-10], but examples of polymorphisms maintained by this mechanism are rare. Here, we present evidence that a polymorphism in an enzyme gene in Drosophila melanogaster is maintained by such a trade-off. The mitochondrially localized aldehyde dehydrogenase in D. melanogaster has two important functions: detoxifying acetaldehyde derived from dietary ethanol [11] and detoxifyin

SUBMITTER: Chakraborty M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4729589 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature