Transcriptomic screen to identify genes regulated by dSET2 in Drosophila third-instar larval nervous system

Gene expression changes in neurons are primarily thought to occur via activity driven transcription of immediate-early genes (Chen et al., 2016). Little notice is given to how intracellular Ca2+ changes downstream of myriad signaling pathways affects neuronal gene expression. We recently identified a set of genes whose expression requires IP3R/Ca2+ signals in larval neurons (Jayakumar et al., 2018). This work studies how IP3R/Ca2+ signals regulate changes in gene expression, critical to growth and development, through the histone methyltransferase dSET2. In this study we investigate how IP3R and dSET2 regulate a common set of developmentally significant genes to enable the larval to pupal transition on a protein deprived diet. mRNA sequencing from three biological replicates of control and dSET2 knockdown third instar larval brains