Objective
Research has been conducted on Drosophila melanogaster including both the long term changes in the distribution of the hobo element in wild populations and the short term changes in laboratory cages, as well as in the progeny of outcrosses of Drosophila melanogaster. These experiments led to the conclusion that the invasion of wild populations must have occurred about 50 years ago. In studies of caged populations, in situ hybridization revealed that the environmental conditions under which the flies had been kept may have been the reason for the differences observed in the genomes.
Studies have been conducted on the mobility of hobo and the data indicate that the inducer strain, by itself, does not alone determine the mobility of hobo. Finally, an unstable mutation of the locus vestigial, due to the insertion of a deleted hobo element, has been isolated and characterized.
In a final series of experiments, other dipteran insects of importance have been screened for sequences similar to hobo, in the hope of isolating transposable elements which could be used in the transformation of other insects.
Certain uni-directional inter-strain crosses in D. melanogaster lead to the occurence of a variety of abnormal traits, including
sterility and increased mutation rates, among their progeny. This phenomenon is called hybrid dysgenesis and it is due to the
independent action of the transposons P, hobo and I. It is proposed 1) to inivestigate in a comparative fashion, the role of the first two elements in hybrid dysgenesis, in a series of molecular and
classical genetic experiments designed to study the potential synergy of the two transposons, and 2) to investigate the distribution of hobo among different strains of D. melanogaster, in order to obtain insights about the evolution of hobo and the mode of invasion of the D. melanogaster, genome.
Fields of science
Topic(s)
Data not availableCall for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
71110 IRAKLION
Greece