Extensive linkage disequilibrium in the achaete-scute complex of Drosophila melanogaster

We have analyzed the level of gametic association between restriction map variants in a sample of 44 X chromosomes from a natural population of Drosophila melanogaster. Of 21 pairwise tests involving 7 restriction map polymorphisms in the yellow-achaete-scute complex, 17 were found to be significant, including some between restriction sites over 80 kb apart. Three-way linkage disequilibria and their variances were also estimated for all 35 three-way comparisons between these loci. Twelve such tests were found to be significant, again spanning distances of up to 80 kb on the restriction map. Only 9 of a possible 128 haplotypes were represented in the sample and 8 of these could be linked together by changes at a single site. The strength of these associations at y-ac-sc is unusual by comparison with studies on other regions of the genome of D. melanogaster, and is consistent with the very low level of recombination which has been reported for the complex. However, our estimate of nucleotide diversity in the region is not significantly different from those made for some other loci in this species.