Gene-by-temperature interactions and candidate plasticity genes for morphological traits in Drosophila melanogaster.

CARREIRA, V. P.; IMBERTI, M; MENSCH, J; FANARA, J.J.

PLOS ONE

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE

Lugar: San Francisco; Año: 2013

1932-6203

Understanding the genetic architecture of any quantitative trait implies knowing if thegenes involved in its expression show different phenotypic effects under distinctenvironmental conditions. Temperature during ontogenesis is an importantenvironmental factor affecting development in holometabolous insects. In particular,individuals raised at lower temperatures are larger than those that grew at highertemperatures. In this context, we analyzed five different adult morphological traits in 42co-isogenic single P-element insertional lines of Drosophila melanogaster raised at17°C and 25°C in order to improve our understanding of the genetic architecture ofmorphological characters in this model organism. Our analyses showed significantdifferences between temperatures for most traits and that the effect of differentmutations changed with temperature. They also revealed extensive genetic variationfor all the characters mostly evidenced by strong genotype by environmentinteractions. Further, our results indicate that the genotype by environment interactionwas predominantly explained by a change in ranking order in all cases suggesting, asthe results derived from the genetic correlation analyses, that a moderate number ofgenes is involved in the expression of each character at both temperatures. In generalterms, our results highlight the need of studying the influence of the environment on theexpression of genes composing the genetic basis of a quantitative trait when theobjective of the investigation is to understand the genetic architecture of the character.Particularly, our results suggest that certain genes (among which we may mentionBtk29A, CG34460, CG43340, Drak, jim, Lsd-2 and Spn) seem to be related to the formof different organs at distinct temperatures. Further studies will help to elucidate therelevance of these genes on the morphogenesis of different body structures in naturalpopulations of D. melanogaster.