title: A potential regulatory polymorphism upstream of hairy is not associated with bristle number variation in wild-caught Drosophila.
abstract: To extend results from laboratory genetic mapping experiments to natural populations it is necessary to estimate the phenotypic effects attributable to laboratory-identified genetic factors in nature. We retested a polymorphism found to be strongly associated with an increase of 0.35 sternopleural bristles in laboratory strains in two large samples of wild-caught Drosophila melanogaster. Despite >90% power to detect effects as low as 0.27 bristles (<1% of the total variation in bristle number) we did not replicate the association in nature. Potential explanations for this result are explored.
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Irvine, California 92697-2525, USA. sjm@uci.edu
authors.forename: Stuart J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Macdonald
authors.forename: Anthony D
authors.initials: AD
authors.lastname: Long
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D000835:Animals, Wild; D001483:Base Sequence; D004331:Drosophila melanogaster / Q000235:genetics*; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation; D014644:Genetic Variation; D005828:Genetics, Population; D015810:Linkage Disequilibrium; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D016133:Polymerase Chain Reaction; D011110:Polymorphism, Genetic; D017384:Sequence Deletion