Context-Dependent Genetic Architecture of Drosophila Lifespan

Understanding the genetic basis of variation in lifespan is a major challenge that is difficult to address in human populations. Evolutionary theory predicts that alleles affecting natural variation in lifespan will have properties that enable them to persist in populations at intermediate frequencies, such as late-life-specific deleterious effects, antagonistic pleiotropic effects on early and late-age fitness components, and/or sex- and environment-specific or antagonistic effects. We used extreme QTL (xQTL) mapping to identify variants and genes that drove allele frequency differentiation between long-lived and randomly collected flies in the two sexes separately under different temperatures.