Over the last 10,000 years Drosophila melanogaster and D. simulans have spread through the world in the wake of human migration. As a consequence, these now cosmopolitan species have been exposed to a variety of novel environments and habitats. For flies living in temperate environments, winter cold represents a novel environment and these species have evolved in response to cold temperatures in several distinct ways. D. melanogaster has evolved a diapause syndrome that confers extreme lifespan extension, reduction in metabolic rate, and elevated stress tolerance;although diapause increases winter survival, individuals able to diapause suffer a fitness disadvantage during the summer and thus this adaptation remains at intermediate frequencies even at high latitudes. D. simulans, on the other hand, appears to have a more modest adaptive response to winter conditions: this species performs well at cool temperatures but does not appear have the capacity to survive prolonged exposure to the harsh temperate winter. Little is known about other overwintering mechanisms in D. simulans, or indeed any evolutionary response to novel temperate environments. Herein, we propose to identify polymorphisms underlying adaptation to temperate climates in D. melanogaster and D. simulans, link these polymorphisms to function and test hypotheses about the evolutionary origin of these polymorphisms. To do this, we will collect large samples of individuals from both of these species (i) across latitude on the East and West coasts of North America, (ii) through the growing season at several sites near Philadelphia, PA and (iii) along an altitudinal transect in Northern California for four replicate years. First, we will identify polymorphisms that vary in consistent fashion through time and space through high- throughput sequencing technologies and we will verify changes in allele frequency through pyrosequencing. Second, we will identify the functional consequences of a subset of these polymorphisms using quantitative genetic and transcriptomic techniques. We hypothesize that many of the polymorphisms we identify will be associated with phenotypes known to vary in a clinal fashion amongst many drosophilid flies. Finally, we will test hypotheses about the evolutionary origin of these polymorphisms by assessing worldwide haplotype diversity at surrounding loci. We hypothesize that most of these adaptive alleles will be subject to soft- sweeps which are characteristic of species with extremely large population sizes or those with large amounts of genetic variation in ancestral populations such as both D. melanogaster and D. simulans.

Public Health Relevance

Using the model organisms, Drosophila melanogaster and D. simulans, this project seeks to identify genetic polymorphisms underlying adaptation to novel environments, determine their function and test hypotheses about their evolutionary origin. Heuristic and analytic methods developed under this proposal can be applied to genomic data in humans to aid in identifying disease causing loci that have become prevalent in humans as we have colonized the world and been exposed to novel environments.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
1R01GM100366-01
Application #
8222842
Study Section
Genetic Variation and Evolution Study Section (GVE)
Program Officer
Eckstrand, Irene A
Project Start
2012-05-15
Project End
2016-04-30
Budget Start
2012-05-15
Budget End
2013-04-30
Support Year
1
Fiscal Year
2012
Total Cost
$459,441
Indirect Cost
$123,406
Name
Stanford University
Department
Biology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
009214214
City
Stanford
State
CA
Country
United States
Zip Code
94305
Li, Yuping; Venkataram, Sandeep; Agarwala, Atish et al. (2018) Hidden Complexity of Yeast Adaptation under Simple Evolutionary Conditions. Curr Biol 28:515-525.e6
Durmaz, Esra; Benson, Clare; Kapun, Martin et al. (2018) An inversion supergene in Drosophila underpins latitudinal clines in survival traits. J Evol Biol 31:1354-1364
Enard, David; Petrov, Dmitri A (2018) Evidence that RNA Viruses Drove Adaptive Introgression between Neanderthals and Modern Humans. Cell 175:360-371.e13
Rajpurohit, Subhash; Gefen, Eran; Bergland, Alan O et al. (2018) Spatiotemporal dynamics and genome-wide association genome-wide association analysis of desiccation tolerance in Drosophila melanogaster. Mol Ecol 27:3525-3540
Behrman, Emily L; Howick, Virginia M; Kapun, Martin et al. (2018) Rapid seasonal evolution in innate immunity of wild Drosophila melanogaster. Proc Biol Sci 285:
Assaf, Zoe June; Tilk, Susanne; Park, Jane et al. (2017) Deep sequencing of natural and experimental populations of Drosophila melanogaster reveals biases in the spectrum of new mutations. Genome Res 27:1988-2000
Rajpurohit, Subhash; Zhao, Xiaqing; Schmidt, Paul S (2017) A resource on latitudinal and altitudinal clines of ecologically relevant phenotypes of the Indian Drosophila. Sci Data 4:170066
Wittmann, Meike J; Bergland, Alan O; Feldman, Marcus W et al. (2017) Seasonally fluctuating selection can maintain polymorphism at many loci via segregation lift. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 114:E9932-E9941
Williams, Caroline M; Ragland, Gregory J; Betini, Gustavo et al. (2017) Understanding Evolutionary Impacts of Seasonality: An Introduction to the Symposium. Integr Comp Biol 57:921-933
Rajpurohit, S; Hanus, R; Vrkoslav, V et al. (2017) Adaptive dynamics of cuticular hydrocarbons in Drosophila. J Evol Biol 30:66-80

Showing the most recent 10 out of 45 publications