Transcriptome-wide study on cactophilic Drosophila species

In this work, we sequenced head and larvae tissues from the four D. mojavensis subspecies, D. arizonae, D. koepferae and D. buzzatii. The data has been used to conduct differential expression analysis between species with different primary hosts. Our results suggest that adaptations that have allowed the shift to columnar cacti may arise from the evolution of gene expression in both head and larvae.