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

BMC Biology

Research Article

Gianfranco Anfora¹  Mirco Rodeghiero¹  Eugenio Aprea¹  Sara Guirao-Rico²  Vivien Horváth²  Josefa González²  Judit Salces-Ortiz²  Gabriel E. Rech²  Llewellyn Green² 

[1] Agriculture Food Environment Centre (C3A), University of Trento, San Michele All’adige (TN), Italy;Research and Innovation Centre, Fondazione Edmund Mach, San Michele All’adige (TN), Italy;Institute of Evolutionary Biology, CSIC, UPF, Barcelona, Spain;

关键词: Cuticular hydrocarbons;    Water content;    Respiration rate;    Post-transcriptional regulation;    tRFs;    Insect physiology;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12915-023-01530-4

 received in 2022-05-23, accepted in 2023-01-27,  发布年份 2023

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundClimate 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.ResultsHere, we characterized the natural variation of European D. melanogaster populations across climate zones and found that strains from arid regions were similar or more tolerant to desiccation compared with strains from temperate regions. Tolerant and sensitive strains differed not only in their transcriptomic response to stress but also in their basal expression levels. We further showed that gene expression changes in tolerant strains correlated with their physiological response to desiccation stress and with their cuticular hydrocarbon composition, and functionally validated three of the candidate genes identified. Transposable elements, which are known to influence stress response across organisms, were not found to be enriched nearby differentially expressed genes. Finally, we identified several tRNA-derived small RNA fragments that differentially targeted genes in response to desiccation stress.ConclusionsOverall, our results showed that basal gene expression differences across individuals should be analyzed if we are to understand the genetic basis of differential stress survival. Moreover, tRNA-derived small RNA fragments appear to be relevant across stress responses and allow for the identification of stress-response genes not detected at the transcriptional level.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© BioMed Central Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2023

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