Extraordinary variation in radiation tolerance: mechanisms and evolution.

Ionizing radiation is a potent environmental mutagen, producing damaged bases and single and double-stranded DNA breaks. Acute high-dose radiation exposure is therefore toxic, causing cellular and organismal mortality, while lower doses can give rise to high mutation rates and cancer. Radiation sensitivity furthermore varies dramatically between organisms and cell types, with certain organisms exhibiting extreme tolerance to ionizing radiation.

Gene expression differences consistent with water loss reduction underlie desiccation tolerance of natural Drosophila populations.

Background: Climate change is one of the main factors shaping the distribution and biodiversity of organisms, among others by greatly altering water availability, thus exposing species and ecosystems to harsh desiccation conditions. However, most of the studies so far have focused on the effects of increased temperature. Integrating transcriptomics and physiology is key to advancing our knowledge on how species cope with desiccation stress, and these studies are still best accomplished in model organisms.

Population-scale long-read sequencing uncovers transposable elements associated with gene expression variation and adaptive signatures in Drosophila.

High quality reference genomes are crucial to understanding genome function, structure and evolution. The availability of reference genomes has allowed us to start inferring the role of genetic variation in biology, disease, and biodiversity conservation. However, analyses across organisms demonstrate that a single reference genome is not enough to capture the global genetic diversity present in populations.

- and -acting variants contribute to survivorship in a naïve population exposed to ryanoid insecticides.

Insecticide resistance is a paradigm of microevolution, and insecticides are responsible for the strongest cases of recent selection in the genome of Here we use a naïve population and a novel insecticide class to examine the ab initio genetic architecture of a potential selective response. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of chlorantraniliprole susceptibility reveal variation in a gene of major effect, (), which we validate with linkage mapping and transgenic manipulation of gene expression. We propose that allelic variation in alters sensitivity to the calcium depletion attributable to chlorantraniliprole's mode of action.

Structural Variants and Selective Sweep Foci Contribute to Insecticide Resistance in the Genetic Reference Panel.

Patterns of nucleotide polymorphism within populations of suggest that insecticides have been the selective agents driving the strongest recent bouts of positive selection. However, there is a need to explicitly link selective sweeps to the particular insecticide phenotypes that could plausibly account for the drastic selective responses that are observed in these non-target insects. Here, we screen the Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel with two common insecticides; malathion (an organophosphate) and permethrin (a pyrethroid).