Investigating the Strange Case of the Drosophila Dot Chromosome
Channel: Genomics Education Partnership
Date: 18/02/2022

In this lecture, Professor Sarah C.R. Elgin from Washington University in St. Louis provides an overview of the scientific rationale for studying the Drosophila Muller F Element. The Drosophila melanogaster Muller F Element (also known as the fourth chromosome or the "dot" chromosome) is largely heterochromatic. However, the distal 1.3 Mb of the D. melanogaster dot chromosome contains ~80 protein-coding genes — similar to the gene density in the euchromatic regions of other autosomes. This presentation describes past studies by the Elgin Lab and other researchers (e.g., the modENCODE project) which identified the unusual characteristics of the D. melanogaster dot chromosome. It also describes how the high quality gene annotations produced by Genomics Education Partnership faculty and students were used in the comparative analysis of the F Elements in multiple Drosophila species to study the changes in gene and repeat characteristics, and to identify factors that enable F Element genes to be expressed in a largely heterochromatic domain.

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Learn more about the F Element Project: https://thegep.org/felement/
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