Genotype by Environment interaction in Drosophila melanogaster larval odor-guided behavior.

LAVAGNINO, N; FANARA, JJ

Stony Broke, New York, USA

Congreso; Evolution Conference; 2006

Society for the Study of Evolution

Odor guided behavior is a crucial character to perceive environmental changes that occur in natural populations. In these sense, how organisms deal with changing environments is an important question in evolutionary biology. The development of the reaction norm perspective in the first half of the XX century was an attempt to answer this question. A reaction norm (RN) is defined as the set of phenotypes that can be produced by a single genotype when is exposed to different environments. RN may be plastic or non-plastic, meaning that the phenotype may or may not change in response to environmental change. However, when there is genetic variance in plasticity not all genotypes responds in the same way to environmental heterogeneity. Such variation is often referred as genotype by environment interaction (GxE). Understanding GxE and plasticity requires, among other issues, to understand its genetic bases. The aim of this poster is to investigate the genetic bases of genotype by environment interaction by studying the genetic bases of D.melanogaster larval odor-guided behavior (OB) in different environments. We found a significant GxE interaction for Drosophila melanogaster larval odor-guided behavior, which can be mostly explained by a change of order in the ranking. These results suggest that the diversity of phenotypic responses to different environments (chemical stimulus) were similar, but there was a differential response by particular genes to each environment. Moreover, these differences support the idea that they are candidate regulatory genes (plasticity genes), or genes regulated by them. These change, whether in regulatory or regulated genes, shows that there is a change in the genetic architecture of the character in response to different environments. In addition our results also suggest that the genetic architecture of odor-guided behavior change along the life cycle of the flies.