Lahari Gadey presents at the 2021 Society for Integrative & Comparative Biology annual conference.

Published: March 17, 2021

Lahari Gadey photo

Lahari Gadey, a master’s student from the Ragland Lab in the Department of Integrative Biology, has finished her poster presentation for the 2021 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) annual conference which was virtual this year. Lahari presented a poster titled “A remarkably consistent life-history trait with a remarkably inconsistent developmental basis: lack of evolutionary conservation of transcriptomic trajectories during tephritid fly diapause” with co-authors, Edwina J. Dowle, Thomas H.Q. Powell, Andrew Nguyen, Nikos T. Papadopoulos, Daniel A. Hahn, and Gregory J. Ragland. The poster emphasized while the two Rhagoletis genus species, R. cerasi and R. pomonella, have similar diapause life-history traits due to the diapause trait having a single evolutionary origin, the same cannot be said for the transcriptomics of diapause. The two species seem to have a divergent set of transcripts in regulating diapause due to using different regulatory pathways to achieve the same phenotypically similar diapause trait. This discovery opens up more questions about how evolutionary conserved the diapause phenotype is in this genus, such as how these regulatory pathways differ in these species or better identifying these diverging sets of transcripts.