Survival in Oregon-R and shibire mutant of Drosophila melanogaster in response to Temperature

Abstract

Using wild-type Oregon-R and shibire mutant Drosophila melanogaster as the organism of study, we were interested in investigating how different temperatures would affect growth, as measured in female thorax length, and the survival rate of the two different D. melanogaster subtypes. These two populations show phenotypic variation when exposed to high lethal temperatures, especially the shibire mutant at 29ºC, where paralysis or death may occur. To study their growth and survival rate, we initially started with larvae of the two populations and placed them in three different temperature treatments of 17ºC, 25ºC, and 29ºC. We analyzed our two main factors of interest shortly after the larvae metamorphosed into adults. Our findings showed that there was no significant difference in growth when D. melanogaster were exposed to different temperatures. We found that there was a significant difference between the treatments of the mutant population in terms of their survival rate, but no other trends were found that related to our hypotheses. Our results do not support our hypotheses which is that increased temperature will decrease female thorax length and decrease survival rate. Two major sources of error that may have contributed to our results were the fluctuation of temperature in one of our incubators and the genetics of the mutant.