Abstract
The efficacy of transcriptional profiling for identifying networks of pleiotropic genes regulating complex traits was assessed. The transcriptional response to starvation stress in males and females of the Oregon-R and 2b Drosophila strains, as well as four recombinant inbred lines derived from them, was shown to be different between the sexes and to involve approximately 25% of the genome.
Highlights
A major challenge of modern biology is to understand the networks of interacting genes regulating complex traits, and the subset of these genes that affect naturally occurring quantitative genetic variation
We identified 153 novel candidate genes for which there was variation in gene expression between the lines and which colocalized with starvation resistance quantitative trait locus (QTL)
The sexually dimorphic transcriptome Nearly one-half of the genome (6,569 probe sets) exhibited significantly different transcript levels between the sexes (P(Sex) < 0.001), with 3,965 probe sets upregulated in females and 2,604 probe sets upregulated in males
Summary
A major challenge of modern biology is to understand the networks of interacting genes regulating complex traits, and the subset of these genes that affect naturally occurring quantitative genetic variation. Assessing subtle effects of induced mutations on quantitative trait phenotypes in model organisms is a straightforward approach to identify genes regulating complex traits [1,2,3]. Mapping quantitative trait loci (QTLs) affecting variation in complex traits to broad genomic regions by linkage to polymorphic molecular markers is straightforward. Our ability to determine what genes in the QTL regions cause the trait variation is hampered by the large number of recombinants required for high-resolution mapping, and the small and environmentally sensitive effects of QTL alleles [1,4]
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