This is an elegant and long paper by Kruglyak lab in our institute. Given the magnitude of the results, I'll just breeze through the most interesting parts (from my point of view, of course). The initial goal of the authors is to discover genes whose expression changes in response to environment in a species-specific manner. The figure below (from the original paper) clearly shows this case.
As you see, the gene-environment interaction is defined as a strain-condition effect on expression between BY and RM yeast strains. In order to pinpoint the genetic determinants of such strain-specific interactions, the authors have expression profiled 109 segragants from these two parents. Knowing the exact alleles at each locus for all of these segragants enables to identify quantative loci that contribute to each strain-condition effect (using gxeQTL). They can also identify cis acting and trans acting elements based on the linkage to the genes.As a showcase, the authors characterized IRA2 as a locus responsible for differential expression of many growth-related genes. As they put it themselves, "The RM allele of IRA2 appears to inhibit Ras/PKA signaling more strongly than the BY allele, and has undergone a change in selective pressure". I'll not go through the specifics of this study... you can refer to the original paper for a more detailed analysis.
1 comment:
I remember when Erin would show me her figures to see if I understood them...as a half-lab member I think I'm the litmus test to see if a non-expert can understand what they're talking about :)
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