Abstract
January 2016’s issue of PLOS Genetics has an outbred genetics study in body size traits [1], perhaps one of the most studied parts of human genetics, but in a somewhat surprising organism—fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster). I will return below to both the motivation for using laboratory organisms for outbred genetics and the opportunities this presents, but let’s first briefly walk through this interesting study.
Highlights
Vonesch and colleagues studied 143 inbred lines (DRGP) that had been drawn from a wild D. melanogaster population inbred by Trudy Mackay and colleagues in North Carolina
Only the first locus is a “traditional” growth gene discovered by the forward genetics approach of screening mutagenized flies for distinguishable phenotypes; the other loci can be linked to growth pathways by interaction maps, but many of them are in uncharacterized genes in the fly
This study reveals a different component of body size control in Drosophila compared to forward genetics—and links some unknown genes in Drosophila to pathways, chipping away at another aspect of metazoan biology
Summary
January 2016’s issue of PLOS Genetics has an outbred genetics study in body size traits [1], perhaps one of the most studied parts of human genetics, but in a somewhat surprising organism— fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster). Vonesch and colleagues studied 143 inbred lines (DRGP) that had been drawn from a wild D. melanogaster population inbred by Trudy Mackay and colleagues in North Carolina.
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