Project description:Heliconius butterfly wing pattern diversity offers a unique opportunity to investigate how natural genetic variation can drive the evolution of complex adaptive phenotypes. Here we took a large-scale transcriptomic approach to identify the network of genes involved in Heliconius wing pattern development and variation. This included applying 147 microarrays representing the Heliconius transcriptome to assay shifts in gene expression across pupal development among several wing pattern morphs of Heliconius erato. We focused in particular on genes differentially expressed relative to the gene optix, which controls red pattern elements in wings. We combined expression results from three hindwing morphs from Peru and from dissected basal to apical wing elements in two forewing morphs to uncover two main classes of genes. First we looked for candidate upstream regulators of optix by determining transcripts expressed differently across basal to apical sections of the forewing prior to optix expression. Second, we assessed how optix regulates downstream gene expression by targeting transcripts with differential expression similar to optix, where expression differs among red wing pattern elements of both the forewing and hindwing.
