F Element Project

One of the unusual features of eukaryotic genomes is the discordance between genome size and the complexity of the organism (i.e., the C-value paradox; Eddy, 2012). The smallest chromosome in Drosophila melanogaster is chromosome 4 (also known as the Muller F element), with an estimated size of ~5.2 Mb (Locke and McDermid, 1993). The D. melanogaster F element is generally packaged as heterochromatin: it has a high repeat content, is packaged throughout with HP1a and H3K9me2/3; it exhibits late replication and little or no recombination. However, the banded portion (~1.4 Mb) of this chromosome also contains ~80 protein-coding genes. These F element genes exhibit a range of expression levels similar to genes that reside in euchromatic domains — indicating that F element genes have acquired distinct features that enable them to function in a heterochromatic environment (reviewed in Riddle and Elgin, 2018).

While the F element has maintained a similar size in many other Drosophila species, it is substantially larger in at least four Drosophila species (i.e., D. ananassae, D. bipectinata, D. kikkawai, and D. takahashii). For example, the D. ananassae Muller F element is more than 18.7 Mb in size. This study will examine the factors (e.g., transposon density) that have contributed to the expansion of the F element in these four Drosophila species, and assess the impact of this expansion on gene characteristics (e.g., codon bias, intron size).

GEP students will produce coding region and transcription start site annotations for F element genes in D. ananassae, D. bipectinata, D. kikkawai, and D. takahashii, as well as for genes in a euchromatic reference region derived from the Muller D element. (Euchromatic regions have not expanded in these species.) Comparative analyses using these datasets will provide insights into the evolutionary impacts of changes in chromosome and gene size, and will facilitate the identification of factors that enable genes to function in a heterochromatic environment. We anticipate that this work will move us toward a better understanding of how and why eukaryotic genomes became so large, for mammals, ~1000X larger than that of E. coli.