Transcriptomics of host adaptation, early results: Gene expression patterns of the cactophilic fly Drosophila buzzatii in its natural breeding and feeding resources

DE PANIS DIEGO; FURIO PEDRO; PADRO JULIAN; SOTO IGNACIO M; TARAZONA SONIA; DOPAZO HERNAN; CONESA ANA; HASSON ESTEBAN

Rosario

Congreso; 4to. Congreso Argentino de Bioinformática y Biología Computacional (4CAB2C) y 4ta. Conferencia Internacional de la Sociedad Iberoamericana de Bioinformática (SolBio); 2013

Congreso Argentino de Bioinformática y Biología Computacional. Asociación Argentina de Bioinformática y Biología Computacional (A2B2C) en conjunto con la Sociedad Iberoamericana de Bioinformática (SoIBio)

Cactophilic species of the subgenus Drosophila have been a model for the study of ecological adaptation and speciation for several decades. Drosophila buzzatii primarily uses decomposing cacti of different species of the Opuntia genus as breeding substrates, while its sibling species, Drosophila koepferae, utilizes columnar cacti of the genera Cereus and Trichocereus. However, some degree of niche overlapping has been described between these two species. Previous studies have shown that fitness components were heavily affected by host shifts in both species, leading to the proposal of the hypothesis that breeding in a secondary host is stressful for D. buzzatii, specially due to the presence of alkaloids. Our project seeks to study the genetic responses to environmental change and its implication in speciation by ecological specialization through transcriptome analysis of these closely related species by RNA-Seq. Transcriptomes of 3rd instar larvae raised in native conditions, and complemented with nutritional supplements and an alkaloid fraction extracted from Trichocereus terschekii, were sequenced with Illumina Hi-Seq 2000, each species in both cacti, and each cacti in every treatment, with 3 biological replicates. Here we show early results of some treatments in one of the two studied species, D. buzzatii.