Meeting Abstract

P3.189  Tuesday, Jan. 6  hCGH Detects Genomic Architecture Among African Cichlids Species of the Genus Julidochromis SCHUMER, Molly E.*; RENN, Suzy C. P.; Reed College, Portland OR schumerm@reed.edu

Cichlids are one of the largest and most diverse vertebrate families, and are remarkable for their rapid radiation. Gene duplication has been identified as a central method for rapid evolution, suggesting that it could play a role in the rapid speciation and novel phenotypic traits found among cichlid species. The genus Julidochromis is of particular interest due to distinct behavioral traits such as sex-role reversal, cooperative brooding, and parental care that vary between individual species. We have used microarrays from a closely related species, Astatotilapia burtoni in order to identify duplicated and diverged genes in four species of Julidochromis. These arrays allowed us to profile the genetic variation between Julidochromis species, and identify genes that have been duplicated or diverged in the Julidochromis family compared to A. burtoni. As expected, there were fewer duplicated (45) than diverged genes (355) when comparing A. burtoni to Julidochromis species, and only a few species-specific duplications (5 for J. dickfeldi, 2 for J. marlieri, 5 for J. ornatus, and 1 for J. transcriptus). These results are currently being confirmed by quantitative real-time PCR and cloning for sequence analysis. This study suggests that microarrays can be used to reliably identify duplicated and diverged genes among cichlid species. This information will also be critical for proper interpretation of future gene expression profiling within and between these species.