US-Switzerland Planning Visit: Gene Expression and Genetic Manipulation of House Fly Sex Determination

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This project will initiate a new collaboration between Richard Meisel's research group at the University of Houston and colleagues in Switzerland and the Netherlands. Meisel and his colleagues will study how male and female house flies develop distinct sets of traits from the same genes. In particular, the research will focus on how gene expression - the production of RNA and protein from genes - differs between males and females. The house fly is well suited for this line of experimentation because the developmental mechanisms that initiate the production of male and female traits are characterized, the genome is sequenced, and resources for genetic experimentation are available. Researchers in the Meisel group will travel to Daniel Bopp's laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland to learn techniques for the genetic manipulation of houseflies. They will also work with European collaborators to design experiments that uncover how mutations in the male and female developmental pathways affect the expression of genes throughout the house fly genome. These experiments will address fundamental questions about the structure of developmental pathways and inform genetic control strategies for insect pests. A graduate student will participate in the planning visit, and undergraduates from under-represented groups in the sciences will be recruited to assist with the experiments. The PI will further use examples from this research in training exercises for middle school science teachers in Houston schools with large at-risk student populations.Developmental networks often consist of conserved central nodes that receive input from evolutionarily dynamic upstream regulators. It is hypothesized that the central nodes are conserved because perturbations to them have deleterious phenotypic effects, whereas the upstream regulators are evolutionarily labile in part because the pathways are robust to these changes. Sex determination (SD) is an ideal model for testing this hypothesis because SD networks have the predicted pattern of evolutionary conservation, and SD genes and the sex-specific phenotypes they produce are well known. This new collaboration will allow for experiments in which RNAi and transgenic approaches are used to manipulate the house fly SD pathway. Organismal phenotypes, including gene expression, will be measured to test whether perturbations to conserved nodes have more drastic phenotypic consequences than changes in their upstream regulators.