Abstract
Identifying the genes involved in polygenic traits has been difficult. In the 1950s and 1960s, laboratory selection experiments for extreme geotaxic behavior in fruit flies established for the first time that a complex behavioral trait has a genetic basis. But the specific genes responsible for the behavior have never been identified using this classical model. To identify the individual genes involved in geotaxic response, we used cDNA microarrays to identify candidate genes and assessed fly lines mutant in these genes for behavioral confirmation. We have thus determined the identities of several genes that contribute to the complex, polygenic behavior of geotaxis.
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Acknowledgements
We thank R.W. Cross for help with statistical analyses, S. Bekele and D. Robinson for technical assistance and H. Dierick, G. Robinson and B. van Swinderen for reviewing the manuscript. The work by K.P.W. was supported by the National Institutes of Health, and all work at the Neurosciences Institute was supported by the Neurosciences Research Foundation.
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Toma, D., White, K., Hirsch, J. et al. Identification of genes involved in Drosophila melanogaster geotaxis, a complex behavioral trait. Nat Genet 31, 349–353 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng893
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ng893
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