Evolutionary and functional genomics of Drosophila gene expression
Final Report Abstract
Our project on the evolutionary and functional genomics of Drosophila gene expression produced three major results. First, a large-scale microarray survey of gene expression variation identified genes that differ in expression between European and African populations of Drosophila melanogaster. These are of interest because they are candidates for genes that have undergone adaptive regulatory evolution to their local environment. Second, analysis of DNA sequence polymorphism in genes that vary in expression level between populations revealed a consistent signal of positive selection in both coding and regulatory regions, including a strong candidate for a populationspecific "selective sweep" in a putative promoter sequence. Third, functional experiments directly demonstrated several genomic factors that influence levels of gene expression, including X chromosome inactivation in the male germline, codon usage bias, and cis-trans regulatory interaclions. The results of this work have been published in high quality joumals, including PLoS Biology and Genome Biology.
Publications
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Hense, W., J. F. Baines, and J. Parsch, 2007. X chromosome inactivation during Drosophila spermatogenesis. PLoS Biology 5: e273.
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Hutter, S., S. S. Saminadin-Peter, W. Stephan, and J. Parsch, 2008. Gene expression variation in African and European populations of Drosophila melanogaster. Genome Biology 9: R12.
