Project description:Thermal acclimation study on Drosophila melanogaster reared at 3 different temperatures (12, 25, and 31oC). The proteomic profiles of D. melanogaster under these different temperatures were analyzed and compared using label-free tandem mass spectrometry.
Project description:Many studies have addressed the effects of adult diet on gene expression in Drosophila melanogaster, however, little is known about how developmental diet influences adult gene expression, and how this interacts with adult dietary conditions. We found that developmental and adult diet exert largely independent effects on gene expression, with the effect of adult diet being considerably larger.We did find effects of developmental diet on the transcriptome that persist into middle and old-age. Most of the genes affected show no correlation with the observed phenotypic effects of larval diet on lifespan, however, in each sex we identified a cluster of ribosome, transcription, and translation-related genes whose expression was altered across the lifespan and negatively correlated with lifespan.
Project description:Identification of the interaction partners of the protein ecdysoneless (Ecd) in Drosophila melanogaster S2 cells as well as profiling of the changes in binding for mutant, truncated Ecd del34 protein.
Project description:Understanding the genotype-phenotype map and how variation at different levels of biological organization is associated are central topics in modern biology. Fast developments in sequencing technologies and other molecular omic tools enable researchers to obtain detailed information on variation at DNA level and on intermediate endophenotypes, such as RNA, proteins and metabolites. This can facilitate our understanding of the link between genotypes and molecular and functional organismal phenotypes. Here, we use the Drosophila melanogaster Genetic Reference Panel and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) metabolomics to investigate the ability of the metabolome to predict organismal phenotypes. We performed NMR metabolomics on four replicate pools of male flies from each of 170 different isogenic lines. Our results show that metabolite profiles are variable among the investigated lines and that this variation is highly heritable. Second, we identify genes associated with metabolome variation. Third, using the metabolome gave better prediction accuracies than genomic information for four of five quantitative traits analyzed. Our comprehensive characterization of population-scale diversity of metabolomes and its genetic basis illustrates that metabolites have large potential as predictors of organismal phenotypes. This finding is of great importance, e.g., in human medicine, evolutionary biology and animal and plant breeding.
Project description:We generate 36 otherwise isogenic Drosophila melanogaster strains differing only in the geographical origin of their mitochondrial genome and Y chromosome to experimentally examine the effects of the uniparentaly inherited parts of the genome, as well as their interaction, in males. We assay gene expression through RNA-sequencing and detect an important role for both mitochondrial and Y-linked genes, as well as extensive mitochondrial-Y chromosome epistasis.
