Cold hardening and transcriptional change in Drosophila melanogaster

Abstract

Cold hardening treatment - a brief exposure to low temperatures - can protect certain insects against subsequent exposure to temperatures sufficiently low to cause damage or lethality. Microarray analysis to examine the changes in transcript abundance associated with cold hardening treatment (0 degrees C for 2 h followed by 30 min recovery at 25 degrees C) was undertaken in Drosophila melanogaster in order to gain insight into this phenomenon. Transcripts associated with 36 genes were identified, a subset of which appeared to be also differentially expressed after heat shock treatment. Quantitative RT-PCR was used to independently determine transcript abundance of a subset of these sequences. Taken together, these assays suggest that stress proteins, including Hsp23, Hsp26, Hsp83 and Frost as well as membrane-associated proteins may contribute to the cold hardening response.

How insects survive the cold: molecular mechanisms—a review

“…However, it was also possible, using functionality of proteins derived from sequence similarity data to identify a potential shift from carbohydrate to fatty acid oxidative pathways during this process. A similar shift appears during hibernation and it is plausible that both cold hardening and hibernation may share similar mechanisms (Qin et al 2005). of Pyrrhocoris apterus exposed to constant low temperature (-5°C) suggesting a failure in the function of an active metabolic component (ion pump), which can result in dissipation of trans-membrane ion balance (Overgaard et al 2007).…”

“…This category includes the aquaporins. These genes were discovered as recently as 1992 by Agre et al (1993) Other approaches include the use of microarrays (Qin et al 2005), exploitation of genome data (Sinclair et al 2007) and proteomics (Colinet et al 2007). Only the latter investigated a non-model organism: the parasitic wasp (Aphidus colemani), whilst the others concentrated on Drosophila.…”

“…Of the studies to date, 10 genes were identified using Table 4). The microarray analysis of Qin et al (2005), chose experimental conditions that avoided the possibility of accidentally detecting genes involved in recovery. Targeted gene analysis of Hsp70 and Frost showed association with recovery from cold stress (Goto, 2001;Rinehart et al, 2006a;Sinclair et al 2007).…”

Latitudinal and cold-tolerance variation associate with DNA repeat-number variation in the hsr-omega RNA gene of Drosophila melanogaster

“…Although we only examined one time point, 20 min into recovery from the cold exposure, our data indicated a large increase in omega-c levels, and that this did not occur for the omega-n transcript. A temporal expression study during cold recovery in this species, as was recently performed by microarrays on which hsr-omega was not represented (Qin et al, 2005), is needed for both hsr-omega transcripts. We also found that constitutive levels of omega-n were reduced in replicate populations selected for cold tolerance, suggesting a role for omega-n in determining fitness following cold exposure.…”

CRISPR-induced null alleles show that Frost protects Drosophila melanogaster reproduction after cold exposure

“…This RCH also preserves reproductive behavior (Shreve et al, 2004). The molecular underpinnings of Drosophila cold tolerance have been explored extensively via microarrays (Qin et al, 2005;Zhang et al, 2011), quantitative trait loci (QTL) (Morgan and Mackay, 2006;Gerken et al, 2015), RNA sequencing (MacMillan et al, 2016) and proteomics (Sørensen et al, 2017), yet surprisingly few genes are consistently upregulated or associated with low temperatures.…”