Alejandra Bodelón: Impact of heat stress on Transposable Element expression and associated small RNAs in Drosophila subobscura
Impact of heat stress on Transposable Element expression and associated small RNAs in Drosophila subobscura
Alejandra Bodelón
Departament de Genètica i de Microbiologia, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain
Global warming is forcing insect populations to move and adapt, triggering adaptive genetic responses. Thermal stress has been described to alter gene expression, repressing the transcription of active genes, and inducing that of others, such as those encoding heat shock proteins. It has also been related to the activation of some specific Transposable Element (TE) families. However, the actual magnitude of this stress on the whole genome and the factors involved in these genomic changes are still unclear. We studied mRNAs and small RNAs in gonads of two populations of Drosophila subobscura, which is considered a good model to study adaptation to temperature changes. In control conditions, we found that a few genes and TE families were differentially expressed between populations, pointing out their putative involvement in the adaptation of populations to their different environments. Under a heat stress, we did not observe huge expression changes, but sex specific changes in gene expression together with a trend towards the overexpression of genes, mainly related to the heat shock response were detected. The heat shock also affected the expression of some specific TE families, mainly retrotransposons, siRNAs and piRNAs amounts, along with the piRNA production from some piRNA clusters. Nevertheless, changes in small RNA amounts could not be clearly correlated to the observed TE expression changes, indicating that other factors as heat-shock dependent chromatin modulation, could also be involved. This work provides the first whole transcriptomic study including genes, TEs and small RNAs after a heat stress in Drosophila subobscura.
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