High-fat and high-sugar diets induce rapid adaptations of fat storage in the house fly Musca domestica L.

Dietary change can be a strong evolutionary force and lead to rapid adaptation in organisms. High-fat and high-sugar diets can challenge key metabolic pathways, negatively affecting other life history traits and inducing pathologies such as obesity and diabetes. In this study, we use experimental evolution to investigate the plastic and evolutionary responses to nutritionally unbalanced diets.

Creating insect neopolyploid lines to study animal polyploid evolution.

Whole-genome duplication (polyploidy) poses many complications but is an important driver for eukaryotic evolution. To experimentally study how many challenges from the cellular (including gene expression) to the life history levels are overcome in polyploid evolution, a system in which polyploidy can be reliably induced and sustained over generations is crucial. Until now, this has not been possible with animals, as polyploidy notoriously causes first-generation lethality.

Divergent evolution of male-determining loci on proto-Y chromosomes of the housefly.

Houseflies provide a good experimental model to study the initial evolutionary stages of a primary sex-determining locus because they possess different recently evolved proto-Y chromosomes that contain male-determining loci (M) with the same male-determining gene, Mdmd. We investigate M-loci genomically and cytogenetically revealing distinct molecular architectures among M-loci. M on chromosome V (M) has two intact Mdmd copies in a palindrome.

Effects of polyploidization and their evolutionary implications are revealed by heritable polyploidy in the haplodiploid wasp Nasonia vitripennis.

Recurrent polyploidization occurred in the evolutionary history of most Eukaryota. However, how neopolyploid detriment (sterility, gigantism, gene dosage imbalances) has been overcome and even been bridged to evolutionary advantage (gene network diversification, mass radiation, range expansion) is largely unknown, particularly for animals. We used the parasitoid wasp Nasonia vitripennis, a rare insect system with heritable polyploidy, to begin addressing this knowledge gap.