Journal article

Genetic, molecular and physiological basis of variation in Drosophila gut immunocompetence

MS Bou Sleiman, D Osman, A Massouras, AA Hoffmann, B Lemaitre, B Deplancke

Nature Communications | Published : 2015

Open access

Abstract

Gut immunocompetence involves immune, stress and regenerative processes. To investigate the determinants underlying inter-individual variation in gut immunocompetence, we perform enteric infection of 140 Drosophila lines with the entomopathogenic bacterium Pseudomonas entomophila and observe extensive variation in survival. Using genome-wide association analysis, we identify several novel immune modulators. Transcriptional profiling further shows that the intestinal molecular state differs between resistant and susceptible lines, already before infection, with one transcriptional module involving genes linked to reactive oxygen species (ROS) metabolism contributing to this difference. This g..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne


Funding Acknowledgements

his work was supported by SNF (fellowship for MBS and BL), FEBS (Long-Term fellowship for DO), funds from the EPFL, AgingX (SystemsX.ch), and the SNSF (CRSI33_127485) for BD. Stocks obtained from the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (NIH P40OD018537) were used in this study. We acknowledge Julien Ayroles, Antonio Meireles Filho, and Francois Leulier for critical reading of the manuscript. We thank Julian Dow, Bloomington and DGRC stock centres for the fly stocks, Guennaelle Dieppois for providing the PA14 bacterial strain, and the Lausanne Genomic Technologies Facility for the help in RNA-sequencing. The computations were performed at the Vital-IT (http://www.vital-it.ch) Center for high-performance computing of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics..