Evolution of the Drosophila simulans proteome in response to adaptation to a novel temperature environment

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Understanding how organisms adapt to novel environments is one of the fundamental questions in evolutionary biology. Adaptation can be traced in the genome as allele frequency changes, which elicit downstream adaptive responses. Detailed knowledge of the molecular mechanisms underlying these adaptive responses is vital to connect the genotype to the phenotype. Temperature is a major environmental factor and affects various physiological and behavioral responses, especially in ectothermic animals like Drosophila. Adaptation to new thermal environments is detectable at multiple molecular levels, e.g. genome, transcriptome and proteome. The proposed project pioneers the use of proteomics in combination with experimental evolution to study proteins involved in temperature adaptation. Proteomics is especially suitable for characterizing molecular phenotypic responses, as proteins are the key molecules in almost all biological processes. We will study Drosophila simulans populations that have been exposed to two different thermal regimes for over 50 and over 100 generations, respectively. Genomic and transcriptomic resources available for these populations give us the unique opportunity to perform an integrated data analysis, studying adaptive responses in unprecedented detail to characterize causative genes and downstream targets of selection. We will investigate the following questions: 1. How does temperature adaptation affect protein abundance? 2. How does temperature adaptation affect the transcriptome and the proteome? 3. Does the integration of transcriptomic and proteomic data provide a better understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying temperature adaptation? 4. Do transcriptomic and proteomic data improve the resolution of genomic signatures of adaptation?