Searching for Longevity Mutations in Flies

One of the reasons researchers work with flies is that it is comparatively cheap to produce mutant breeding lines - even hundreds of different ones. So studies like this can exist: "To identify genes involved in aging, we assessed longevity in a collection of over 1,300 Drosophila lines ... We found 58 mutations in novel loci that increase life span by up to 33%. Most mutations had different effects on male and female life span, and for some the effects were opposite between the sexes. Effects of these mutations on starvation resistance, chill coma recovery, and climbing ability varied, but all had a deleterious effect on at least one other trait. A sample of ten mutations with increased life span formed genetic interaction networks, but the genetic interactions were different, and sometimes in opposite directions, in males and females. ... Whole-genome transcript profiles of seven of the mutant lines and the wild type revealed 4,488 differentially expressed transcripts, 553 of which were common to four or more of the mutant lines, which include genes previously associated with life span and novel genes implicated by this study. Therefore longevity has a large mutational target size; genes affecting life span have variable allelic effects; alleles affecting life span exhibit antagonistic pleiotropy and form epistatic networks; and sex-specific mutational effects are ubiquitous."

Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2912381/

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