Gene expression in first-instar larvae from pools of DSPR lines after no-drug and nicotine-exposure treatments. Drosophila melanogaster

The goal is to measure gene expression in first-instar larvae derived from Drosophila Synthetic Population Resource (DSPR) Recombinant Inbred Lines (RILs). Specifically, we wish to identify changes between pools of RILs that are relatively resistant to nicotine exposure and those that are relatively susceptible, and also find changes in expression on exposure to nicotine. We took a series of RILs from the pB2 DSPR panel (FlyRILs.org) that had been previously phenotyped by Marriage et al. (2014, PMID:25236448), and extracted RNA from ~30 first instar larvae from each RIL under control, no-drug conditions, and following a short exposure to nicotine. We pooled RNA from multiple strains of similar resistance for each treatment, and constructed an Illumina un-stranded TruSeq RNAseq library from each of the 4 resulting RNA pools. Each library was pooled and sequenced over a single High Output SR100 HiSeq2500 lane in the KU Genome Sequencing Core (gsc.ku.edu).