Cold hardening gene expression

Cold hardening treatment, a brief exposure to low temperatures (e.g. 0°C for 2 h), can protect certain insects against subsequent exposure to temperatures sufficiently low to cause damage or lethality. Microarray analysis to examine the changes in transcript abundance associated with cold hardening has been undertaken in Drosophila melanogaster in order to gain insight into this phenomenon. Transcripts associated with 36 genes were identified, a subset of which appeared to be also differentially expressed after heat shock treatment. Quantitative RT-PCR was used to independently determine transcript abundance of a subset of these sequences. Taken together, these assays suggest that stress proteins, including Hsp23, Hsp26, Hsp83 and Frost as well as membrane-associated proteins may contribute to the cold hardening response. Keywords: cold stress response Co-reared flies were separated into a control group and a treatment group at random. RNA was isolated from the cold-shocked flies and the respective controls and was used for direct comparisons on cDNA microarrays. Treatments were not varied as they had been optimized in previous studies. A pilot experiment was performed using the Drosophila 7k2 array (GPL311) and subsequently three pairs of independent biological samples were evaluated with the Drosophila 12k1 array (GPL1467).