Jumping genes meet abdominal bristles: hybrid dysgenesis-induced quantitative variation inDrosophila melanogaster

Abstract

When males from a strain of Drosophila melanogaster which have multiple copies of the P family of transposable elements integrated into their genome (Bingham, Kid well & Rubin, 1982) ( strains) are crossed to females of strains lacking those elements ( strains), the F1 progeny manifest a number of aberrant traits known collectively as hybrid dysgenesis (Kidwell, Kidwell & Sved, 1977). Progeny of the reciprocal cross (P ♂M) are normal. The dysgenic syndrome is characterized by a high degree of genomic instability caused by enhanced transposition of P elements. Since mutations at visible loci and chromosomal rearrangements are frequently observed in dysgenic hybrids, it was hypothesized that this phenomenon could be used to investigate the effects of transposition on quantitative characters; therefore, the progeny of dysgenic and non-dysgenic crosses were artificially selected for high and low abdominal bristle number. The response to selection, phenotypic variation, and realized heritability were all increased in the dysgenic lines, relative to the non-dysgenic control. It is postulated that these features are the result of P element-induced mutations of loci affecting bristle number, and that future work should lead to the identification of these loci, as well as elucidating the role of transposition in population differentiation for metric traits