Recent selection on immunity genes in Drosophila
Dr. Stephan Hutter
Postdoc: Dr. Aurélien Tellier
PhD student: Francesco Paparazzo
The goal of this project is to gain insights into the evolution of genes involved in the innate immunity response to parasite infection. We develop population genetics methods to detect genes that are involved in host-parasite coevolution and have been under recent selection. We are particularly interested in the type of selection acting on these genes and in the distinction of the resulting coevolutionary scenarios (e.g. trench warfare vs. arms race). We plan to apply our statistical methods to available DNA polymorphism data sets obtained from genome scans of three Drosophila melanogaster populations from different geographic regions and to data to be collected in the experimental part of this project. Thus, in addition to the development of theoretical methods, we also investigate the transcriptional response to microbial infection in the same three Drosophila populations using microarray experiments, and analyze selection at the candidate loci by DNA sequencing.