Meeting Abstract
We subjected five replicate populations of Drosophila melanogaster to selection for starvation resistance and compared them to a founding control population that had been maintained at large population sizes to reduce linkage disequilibrium. After only one generation of selection, all five replicate selected populations survived longer without food than the control population, and starvation survival continued to increase over the next 9 subsequent generations. Previous studies have shown that long-term starvation-selected Drosophila contain more lipid, have lower metabolic rates and develop more slowly than controls. Lipid contents in our selected populations increased within three generations, and development tended to be slower within five. Samples were collected each generation for a genome-wide association study to link changes in SNP allele frequency with evolved phenotypic changes. Preliminary findings of the GWAS will be presented.
