Evolving toxic flies

Evolutionary transitions underlying large-scale phenotypic change are difficult to study because they often occur over millions of years. However, the fruit fly has a short generation time and a small genome that is well annotated and cheap to sequence. We are using experimental evolution to evolve toxin-sequestering fruit flies. Evolutionary changes in the fruit fly genome, transcriptome, and physiology will generate a model of how chemical defense arises that will inform future studies in poison frogs and other organisms.

Douglas et al. 2022. Trade-offs between cost of ingestion and rate of intake drive defensive toxin use. 2022. Biology Letters 18(2): 20210579. DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2021.0579 • PDF