Annotation and Comparison of Drosophila takahashii Genes on the Dot Chromosome

The overall goal for this project is to understand how genes are expressed in a heterochromatic environment. Chromosome four (Dot chromosome; Muller F element) of Drosophila melanogaster is 1.3 Mb long with ~80 genes but is largely heterochromatic. In the Genomics Education Partnership (GEP) project, we are currently annotating a group of species that was diverged from D. melanogaster about 10 million years ago. Our project was to annotate genes on a 70,000 base pair region (contig40) of the D. takahashii Dot chromosome. In order to annotate the genes we used the BLASTX, gene predictors like Gene Scan, RNA‐sequence data, and the results from the Gene Model Checker. According to the gene predictor, Gene Scan, this contig contains five protein‐coding genes. It predicted the genes Slip1 , Myo , CG11360 , a gene of unknown function ( GI25919 ), and another gene that appears to be a Mex3A‐Slip1 fusion. We annotated the genes Slip1 , Myo , CG11360 , and GI25919 . We are currently annotating the gene Mex3A‐Slip1 fusion gene. The D. takahashii genes that are similar to D. melanogaster are Myo and Slip1 . Myo has an identity of 73.1% and a similarity of 81.8%. Slip1 has an identity of 72.3% and a similarity of 82.2%. CG11360 is very different with an identity of 13.1% and a similarity of 26.8%. In contrast to the D. takahashii genes that are present in D. melanogaster , GI25919 is not present at all. It is predicted to be present in several other species including: D. mojavensis, Aedes albopictus , Stomoxys calcitrans , and Musca domestica . We compared GI25919 to D. mojavensis and it has an identity of 39% and a similarity of 55%. In conclusion, some D. takahashii Dot chromosome genes within this region are similar to D. melanogaster , but others are very divergent or missing in D. melanogaster . Our data will be combined with other gene annotations from students in the GEP for a comparative genomics study to identify conserved gene regulatory elements. Support or Funding Information NSF HRD#1623340NSF IUSE #1431407 This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .