The Department is pleased to announce that Lahari successfully defended her thesis on July 15, 2021! Congratulations Lahari!
Lahari Gadey
Integrative Biology M.S. Candidate in Dr. Greg Ragland’s Lab
WHEN: July 15, 2021, 1:00p
WHERE: Seminar will be presented via Zoom
Zoom Meeting: You can email Jacki Craig for the Zoom Link Information and preferably before 12:25 on the day of the defense.
Comparative Transcriptomics Reveal Tissue-Specific Regulation in Plastic Responses to
Thermal Stress in Drosophila melanogaster
Environmental conditions that impose stress by inhibiting regular cell functions elicit a well-described cellular response across a variety of organisms. With constantly changing environments and organisms to adapt to changing temperatures and conditions will depend crucially on plastic changes in traits in response to the environment. Cellular stress response is important in mitigating and repairing thermal damage, however, its contribution to whole organism stress response is unknown. Tissue-specific response to cold stressors has been rarely studied, and it is unknown if whole organism response is an accurate representation of an organism’s thermal stress response, as whole-organism response may overwhelm or mask tissue-specific responses. In this study, the fly species Drosophila melanogaster is stressed at 4 different temperatures, 21⸰C, 7⁰C, 0⁰C, and 21A⁰C (0⁰C stressor with a 30-minute recovery). At each stressor temperature, one of three different tissues was dissected out (brain, gut, or ovaries). After RNA extraction, library prep, sequencing, and cleaning, the data was modeled for the effect of tissue and temperature. Then WGCNA was performed, and cluster lists were submitted to DAVID for functional enrichment. This study reveals that the brain, gut, and ovary all have distinct expression profiles at each stressor temperature, with a total of 3,551 transcripts being differentially expressed over all of the temperatures. The ovaries were found to have the most distinct response, with almost the exact opposite trajectory patterns to the gut. Only 141 transcripts were found to have a temperatures effect (no interaction), indicating that Cellular Stress Response does not play a big role in expression at the tissue or system level of this organism. Using whole organism homogenates for sampling may not accurately represent expression throughout the body of the organism. Functional enrichment for transcripts from each module produced from the WGCNA analysis was run through DAVID and suggests that ion regulation and neurotransmitter activity are affected by cold stress.
Everyone is welcome to join the seminar, please see the Zoom link information above.