Papers in the Biological Sciences
Document Type
Article
Date of this Version
2011
Citation
Bickel RD, Kopp A, Nuzhdin SV (2011) Composite Effects of Polymorphisms near Multiple Regulatory Elements Create a Major-Effect QTL. PLoS Genet 7(1): e1001275. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1001275.
Abstract
Many agriculturally, evolutionarily, and medically important characters vary in a quantitative fashion. Unfortunately, the genes and sequence variants accounting for this variation remain largely unknown due to a variety of biological and technical challenges. Drosophila melanogaster contains high levels of sequence variation and low linkage disequilibrium, allowing us to dissect the effects of many causative variants within a single locus. Here, we take advantage of these features to identify and characterize the sequence polymorphisms that comprise major effect QTL alleles segregating at the bric-a-brac locus. We show that natural bric-a-brac alleles with large effects on cuticular pigmentation reflect a cumulative impact of polymorphisms that affect three functional regions: a promoter, a tissue-specific enhancer, and a Polycomb response element. Analysis of allele-specific expression at the bric-a-brac locus confirms that these polymorphisms modulate transcription at the cis-regulatory level. Our results establish that a single QTL can act through a confluence of multiple molecular mechanisms and that sequence variation in regions flanking experimentally validated functional elements can have significant quantitative effects on transcriptional activity and phenotype. These findings have important design and conceptual implications for basic and medical genomics.
Comments
Copyright 2011 Bickel et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.