Dynamics of Genetic Diversity Maintenance in Inbred Populations

• Grant number: 24/08829-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate (Direct)
• Start date: August 01, 2025
• End date: July 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Biological Sciences - Genetics
• Principal Investigator: Tatiana Teixeira Torres
• Grantee: Diniz Lima Ferreira
• Supervisor: Christian Schlotterer
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biociências (IB). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Veterinärmedizinische Universität Wien, Austria
• Associated to the scholarship: 21/10022-8 - Evolve and resequencing to understand blowfly trophic specialization, BP.DD

Abstract

The maintenance of variation in natural populations is a central, but still unresolved question in biology. While the focus has been on the excess of variation in outbred populations, the maintenance of residual variation during inbreeding is also not yet fully understood. Associative overdominance is the most popular explanation for the maintenance of variation during inbreeding; the presence of recessive lethal alleles that leads to the persistence of genetic diversity. An experiment conducted in Prof. Schlötterer's lab at the Veterinärmedizinische Universität Wien involved mating brother-sister Drosophila simulans flies for multiple generations. After 16 generations of inbreeding, not a single out of 50 independent lines was completely inbred. The goal of this project is to characterize this novel mechanism of variation maintenance during inbreeding. I will use a combination of experimental evolution, fitness assays, and whole genome sequencing to understand this interesting phenomenon.