Naturally segregating genetic variants contribute to thermal tolerance in a Drosophila melanogaster model system.

Thermal tolerance is a fundamental physiological complex trait for survival in many species. For example, everyday tasks such as foraging, finding a mate, and avoiding predation are highly dependent on how well an organism can tolerate extreme temperatures. Understanding the general architecture of the natural variants within the genes that control this trait is of high importance if we want to better comprehend thermal physiology.

Naturally segregating genetic variants contribute to thermal tolerance in a r model system.

Thermal tolerance is a fundamental physiological complex trait for survival in many species. For example, everyday tasks such as foraging, finding a mate, and avoiding predation, are highly dependent on how well an organism can tolerate extreme temperatures. Understanding the general architecture of the natural variants of the genes that control this trait is of high importance if we want to better comprehend how this trait evolves in natural populations.

Multiple genetic loci affect place learning and memory performance in Drosophila melanogaster.

Learning and memory are critical functions for all animals, giving individuals the ability to respond to changes in their environment. Within populations, individuals vary, however the mechanisms underlying this variation in performance are largely unknown. Thus, it remains to be determined what genetic factors cause an individual to have high learning ability and what factors determine how well an individual will remember what they have learned.

A model-based high throughput method for fecundity estimation in fruit fly studies.

The ability to quantify fecundity is critically important to a wide range of experimental applications, particularly in widely-used model organisms such as Drosophila melanogaster. However, the standard method of manually counting eggs is time consuming and limits the feasibility of large-scale experiments. We develop a predictive model to automate the counting of eggs from images of eggs removed from the media surface and washed onto dark filter paper.

The evolutionary potential of diet-dependent effects on lifespan and fecundity in a multi-parental population of Drosophila melanogaster.

The nutritional conditions experienced by a population have a major role in shaping trait evolution in many taxa. Constraints exerted by nutrient limitation or nutrient imbalance can influence the maximal value that fitness components such as reproduction and lifespan attains, and organisms may shift how resources are allocated to different structures and functions in response to changes in nutrition. Whether the phenotypic changes associated with changes in nutrition represent an adaptive response is largely unknown.

How to get the most bang for your buck: the evolution and physiology of nutrition-dependent resource allocation strategies.

All organisms use resources to grow, survive and reproduce. The supply of these resources varies widely across landscapes and time, imposing ultimate constraints on the maximal trait values for allocation-related traits. In this review, we address three key questions fundamental to our understanding of the evolution of allocation strategies and their underlying mechanisms.

Genetic Dissection of Nutrition-Induced Plasticity in Insulin/Insulin-Like Growth Factor Signaling and Median Life Span in a Multiparent Population.

The nutritional environments that organisms experience are inherently variable, requiring tight coordination of how resources are allocated to different functions relative to the total amount of resources available. A growing body of evidence supports the hypothesis that key endocrine pathways play a fundamental role in this coordination. In particular, the insulin/insulin-like growth factor signaling (IIS) and target of rapamycin (TOR) pathways have been implicated in nutrition-dependent changes in metabolism and nutrient allocation.

Transcriptome profiling of natural dichromatism in the annual fishes Nothobranchius furzeri and Nothobranchius kadleci.

Background: The annual fish Nothobranchius furzeri is characterized by a natural dichromatism with yellow-tailed and red-tailed male individuals. These differences are due to different distributions of xanthophores and erythrophores in the two morphs. Previous crossing studies have showed that dichromatism in N.

The age related markers lipofuscin and apoptosis show different genetic architecture by QTL mapping in short-lived Nothobranchius fish.

Annual fish of the genus Nothobranchius show large variations in lifespan and expression of age-related phenotypes between closely related populations. We studied N. kadleci and its sister species N.

Parallel evolution of senescence in annual fishes in response to extrinsic mortality.

Background: Early evolutionary theories of aging predict that populations which experience low extrinsic mortality evolve a retarded onset of senescence. Experimental support for this theory in vertebrates is scarce, in part for the difficulty of quantifying extrinsic mortality and its condition- and density-dependent components that -when considered- can lead to predictions markedly different to those of the "classical" theories. Here, we study annual fish of the genus Nothobranchius whose maximum lifespan is dictated by the duration of the water bodies they inhabit.