Drosophila Tour

Blog post edited by Anonymous - "Migrated to Confluence 4.0"We had the opportunity last week to stop by the Dworkin lab for a quick tour.Dr. Ian Dworkin (link toDworkinlab) is doing someinteresting work studying evolution and drosophila wings (fruit flies). He hadrows of cages, each filled with different lines of experiments and controls.We have been collaborating together for almost a year, and a few of my SummerUndergraduate Research students are working on projects related to Ian'simages. In some of the experiments, the researchers take images of fly wingsand try to understand how the fly’s genes impact wing growth.The following is an example of an image:Here’s a brief summary of our research goals for this collaboration (takenfrom a funding proposal):Drosophila Wing Images are two-dimensional representations of afunctionally important anatomical structure. Variation in wing shape isinfluenced by sex, genotype, and rearing environments; are representative forrelatively two dimensional structures, but similar tools are easily extendedto three dimensional (e.g., most other body parts) structures. Wing shape hasbeen widely used to study the genetic architecture of complex traits (Dworkinet al 2005; Dworkin and Gibson 2006; Mezey et al 2006).Our objective is to find the underlying structure of variation in thephenotype—and to associate this variation with variables of interest tobiologists (genotype, sex, fitness)—directly from the images themselves,rather than predetermining through the selection of landmarks which aspects ofthe phenotype are “important” to be captured. Two major challenges in thisproject are (1) automatic (and thus high throughput) extraction of featuresthat captures the majority of variation in the pixel-level wing images; and(2) analysis and classification of the features on high-dimensional predictorvariables such as genotype. Thus the data will tell us which are thebiologically important features, and why they are biologically important.ViewOnlineBlogpost migrated from ICER Wiki using custom python script. Comment on errors below.