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The contributions of sex, genotype and age to transcriptional variance in Drosophila melanogaster

Nature Genetics volume 29, pages 389–395 (2001)Cite this article

Abstract

Here we present a statistically rigorous approach to quantifying microarray expression data that allows the relative effects of multiple classes of treatment to be compared and incorporates analytical methods that are common to quantitative genetics. From the magnitude of gene effects and contributions of variance components, we find that gene expression in adult flies is affected most strongly by sex, less so by genotype and only weakly by age (for 1- and 6-wk flies); in addition, sex × genotype interactions may be present for as much as 10% of the Drosophila transcriptome. This interpretation is compromised to some extent by statistical issues relating to power and experimental design. Nevertheless, we show that changes in expression as small as 1.2-fold can be highly significant. Genotypic contributions to transcriptional variance may be of a similar magnitude to those relating to some quantitative phenotypes and should be considered when assessing the significance of experimental treatments.

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Figure 1: Visual representation of effects of sex, genotype and age on gene expression.
Figure 2: Plots of normalized gene expression level against treatment.
Figure 3: Volcano plots of significance against effect.
Figure 4: Lack of correlation between sex and genotype effects.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Sall for discussions; B. Sosinski and L. He for help with resequencing the EST set and establishing the microarray facility; and M. Arbeitman, B. Null, E. Johnson, E. Furlong, F. Imam, A. Wagoner and M. Magwire for helping to prepare miniprep cDNA clones from the EST library. This work was supported by grants to G.G. from the National Institute of Aging and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation.

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Author notes

  1. Wei Jin

    Present address: Paradigm Genetics, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, 27709, USA

  2. Wei Jin and Rebecca M. Riley: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Genetics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, 27695-7614, North Carolina, USA

    Wei Jin, Rebecca M. Riley, Gisele Passador-Gurgel & Greg Gibson

  2. SAS Institute, Cary, 27513, North Carolina, USA

    Russell D. Wolfinger

  3. Department of Genetics, Yale University, New Haven, 06520, Connecticut, USA

    Kevin P. White

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  1. Wei Jin
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Correspondence to Greg Gibson.

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Jin, W., Riley, R., Wolfinger, R. et al. The contributions of sex, genotype and age to transcriptional variance in Drosophila melanogaster. Nat Genet 29, 389–395 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng766

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