209W Poster - Population Genetics
Wednesday June 08, 9:15 PM - 10:00 PM

Authors:
Dan Zhou ¹; Gabriel Haddad ^1,2

Affiliations:
1) Univ Califonia, San Diego; 2) The Rady Children's Hospital, San Diego

Keywords:
Complex traits

Hypoxia (lack of oxygen) can be an environmental stress at high altitude or a part of the etiology of many diseases. Understanding the mechanisms regulating hypoxia tolerance or susceptibility is essential for developing novel strategies for prevention or treatment. To do so, we generated 3 populations of hypoxia-adapted flies through experimental evolution over ~300 generations. As compared to the controls, we observed multiple phenotypic changes in flies that evolved under hypoxic conditions. These include a higher oxygen consumption rate under hypoxic condition, a reduced body weight and size, a delayed developmental time that was reversible at later generations growing in the same hypoxic condition, and a reduced level of mitochondrial ROS generation. Furthermore, through whole genomic sequencing and high throughput profiling, we identified genomic regions that were under selection, as well as genes, signaling pathways and metabolic adjustments that play important roles in hypoxia tolerance. We found that the hypoxia tolerant trait is stably maintained in the population stocks even after years of returning to normoxic condition. In addition, we derived a panel of low oxygen tolerant (PLOT) isofemale lines from these hypoxia-adapted populations, which exhibited various levels of hypoxia tolerance under severe, normally lethal, hypoxic conditions. We believe that this unique resource is a powerful tool for identifying and dissecting the mechanisms underlying hypoxia tolerance or susceptibility as well as regulating hypoxic stress-directed evolution, and studying phenotypic plasticity and the genomic dynamics along experimental evolution.