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Updated: Oct 18, 2025

Measuring and Altering Mating Drive in Male Drosophila melanogaster
Published on: February 15, 2017
Interaction of Male Specific Lethal complex and genomic imbalance on global gene expression in Drosophila
Shuai Zhang1, Haizhu Qi1, Cheng Huang1,2
1Beijing Key Laboratory of Gene Resource and Molecular Development, College of Life Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China.
Abstract:
The inverse dosage effect caused by chromosome number variations shows global consequences in genomic imbalance including sexual dimorphism and an X chromosome-specific response. To investigate the relationship of the MSL complex to genomic imbalance, we over-expressed MSL2 in autosomal and sex chromosomal aneuploids, and analyzed the different transcriptomes. Some candidate genes involved in regulatory mechanisms have also been tested during embryogenesis using TSA-FISH. Here we show that the de novo MSL complex assembled on the X chromosomes in females further reduced the global expression level on the basis of 2/3 down-regulation caused by the inverse dosage effect in trisomy through epigenetic modulations rather than induced dosage compensation. Plus, the sexual dimorphism effect in unbalanced genomes was further examined due to the pre-existing of the MSL complex in males. All these results demonstrate the dynamic functions of the MSL complex on global gene expression in different aneuploid genomes.
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