A genomic signature of gene-environment interactions in C. elegans. Caenorhabditis elegans

The phenotype is an interplay between genetic and environmental components, however the relationship between these two is difficult to predict. For any particular environment only a handful of genes show gene environment interaction [refs]. This may imply that certain constrains prevent genes to participate in gene environment interaction that possibly could be used to predict potential targets for such interaction under different sets of environmental conditions. Our approach was to culture 6 C. elegans strains (5 geographical isolates + 1 mutant straint) at 20°C, then split the culture into 5 conditions. We measured mRNA abundances in 4-cell stage embryos using microarray with three separately collected 50-embryo replicates collected for each combination of strain and environment. Overall design: 90 microarrays of C. elegans for 6 strains * 5 conditions in triplicates.