Project description:Natural populations of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, segregate genetic variation that leads to cardiac disease phenotypes. Drosophila is well-known as a model for studying the mechanisms by which human disease genes cause pathology, including heart disease, but it is less well appreciated that they may also model the genetic architecture of disease, since flies presumably also have diseases that have a genetic basis. It is reasoned that most of these aberrant inbred line effects would be due to capture of rare variants of large effect as homozygotes, allowing the variants to be mapped rapidly using contemporary genomic approaches. In order to map the genetic variants in flies, we used single feature polymorphism (SFP) analysis to contrast the genome-wide genotype frequencies between pools of flies with aberrant and normal heart phenotype. SFP analysis is an indirect method for genome-wide genotyping that utilizes differential hybridization of genomic DNA to probes on a DNA chip that was initially designed for gene expression profiling, but can be used for species where genotyping chips are not available.
Project description:Transcriptional profiling of Drosophila melanogaster 2nd chromosome substitution lines; Background chromosomes are identical across lines; 2nd chromosomes are different across line and can be homozygous or heterozygous within each line Keywords: Natural variation
Project description:Wild-type laboratory strains of model organisms are typically kept in isolation for many years, with the action of genetic drift and selection on mutational variation causing lineages to diverge with time. Natural populations from which such strains are established, show that gender-specific interactions in particular drive many aspects of sequence level and transcriptional level variation. Here, our goal was to identify genes that display transcriptional variation between laboratory strains of Drosophila melanogaster, and to explore evidence of gender-biased interactions underlying that variability. Keywords: expression analysis; gender and genotype effects
Project description:The mechanisms underlying natural variation in lifespan and ageing rate remain largely unknown. We performed microarray experiment to characterise genome-wide expression patterns of a long-lived, natural variant of Drosophila melanogaster resulting from selection for starvation resistance (SR) and compare it with normal-lived control flies (C).
