The exposure to cancer treatments (chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery) can adversely affect all aspects of reproductive health, possibly determining temporary or permanent hypogonadism of a primary or secondary form. In prepubertal male patients, the only option for preserving fertility is testicular tissue banking. Although significant progress has been made in fertility-based animal research with SSCs, this procedure is still in an early experimental stage. Can an experimental technique, which has potential benefits and possible risks, be offered to minors? What is the minor's best interest in this situation? Is it more important to minimize the risks of morbidity and mortality or to preserve the child's future fertility?
As DNA sequencing throughput increases, novel strategies for discovering genes that affect traits of interest become available. One strategy starts with a population of animals and selects individuals over multiple generations for a particular trait. Subsequent whole genome sequencing should identify loci affecting this trait. We apply this strategy by sorting flies for wing length over 18 generations, obtaining two populations that differ in wing length by 20%.Flies with longer wings had increased overall body sizes and elevated TOR activity, suggesting that genetic variation targets TOR signaling to influence body size. High-throughput sequencing of big and small flies identified thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms that differed between the two populations, leading us to identify five novel regulators of TOR signaling.Surprisingly, stochastic simulations of the process show that large fractions of the genetic differences between the big and small flies are probably biological false positives, selected by chance by random drift. We employ these computer simulations to identify experimental setup parameters to improve the signal-to-noise ratio for successfully running sort-and-sequence experiments -a resource which will hopefully be useful for the community.
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