Molecular evolution of Drosophila metallothionein genes

The metallothionein genes of Drosophila melanogaster, Mtn and Mto, may play an important role in heavy metal detoxification. Several different tandem duplications of Mtn have been shown to increase cadmium and copper tolerance, as well as Mtn expression. In order to investigate the possibility of increased selection for duplications of these genes in natural populations exposed to high levels of heavy metals, we compared the frequencies of such duplications among flies collected from metal-contaminated and non-contaminated orchards in Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Georgia. Restriction enzyme analysis was used to screen 1666 wild third chromosomes for Mtn duplications and a subset (327) of these lines for Mto duplications. The frequency of pooled Mtn duplications found ranged from 0% to 20%, and was not significantly higher at the contaminated sites. No Mto duplications were identified. Estimates of sequence diversity at the Mtn locus among a subsample (92) of the duplication survey were obtained using four-cutter analysis. This analysis revealed a low level of polymorphism, consistent with both selection at the Mtn locus, and a fairly recent origin for the duplications. To further examine this hypothesis, we sequenced an Mtn allele of Drosophila simulans and measured the amount of nucleotide sequence divergence between D. simulans and its sibling species D. melanogaster. The levels of silent nucleotide polymorphism and divergence in the Mtn region were compared with those in the Adh region, using the neutrality test of R.R. Hudson, M. Kreitman and M. Aguadé.