Population-Based Resequencing of Experimentally Evolved Populations Reveals the Genetic Basis of Body Size Variation in Drosophila melanogaster

Population-Based Resequencing of Experimentally Evolved Populations Reveals the Genetic Basis of Body Size Variation in Drosophila melanogaster: "Author Summary

Understanding the causes and consequences of natural genetic variation is crucial to the characterization of biological evolution. Moreover, natural genetic variation is comprised of millions of perturbations, which are partially randomized across genotypes such that a small number of individuals can be used to combinatorially analyze a large number of differences, facilitating mechanistic understanding of biological systems. Here we demonstrate a powerful technique to parse genomic variation using artificial selection. By selecting replicate populations of Drosophila flies to become bigger and smaller, and then determining the evolutionary response at the genomic level, we have mapped hundreds of genes that respond to selection on body size. As our approach is powerful and cost-effective compared to existing approaches, we expect it to be a major component of diverse future efforts.

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