Dissecting the Genetic Basis of Thermal Tolerance in a Muti-Parental Population of Fruit Flies

For my research, I use a combination of quantitative genetics and genomics approaches to dissect the genetic basis of thermal tolerance in a multi-parental population of fruit flies, known as the Drosophila Synthetic Population Resource (DSPR). I phenotyped ~40,000 individuals and found that there is a wide range of phenotypic variation in thermal tolerance. I also performed Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) mapping and found that there are 8 QTLs that influence thermal tolerance in this population. Then, to identify candidate genes I performed RNA-seq and found several possible candidate genes.