
[Annulé] Séminaire de l’Institut Jacques Monod – Marla Sokolowski
24 février 2025 - 11 h 45 min - 13 h 00 min

Ce séminaire est annulé.
Invité par l’équipe Courtier, Marla Sokolowski (Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto) va présenter un séminaire de l’Institut Jacques Monod sur le thème :
The foraging gene: will that be for here or to go?
Résumé :
The Drosophila melanogaster foraging (for) gene, with its rover and sitter larval foraging variants, is an established behaviour genetics model. Orthologues of the foraging gene also modulate the individual and social behaviour of a wide range of species including the regulation of behaviour in eusocial insects. In Drosophila, foraging modifies the expression of multiple traits, including feeding and foraging, stress tolerance, sleep, metabolism, dispersal, escape responses, social behaviour, and learning and memory. From a social context perspective, Drosophila foraging affects larval clustering during foraging under high larval densities, adult social behaviour and social networks, and social learning. We wondered how foraging accomplishes its behavioural pleiotropy at the molecular level. We found that D. melanogaster foraging has a complex modular genomic structure with four promoters, 21 transcripts, and eight protein isoforms. The four promoter modules are differentially regulated during development and in a timescale, tissue, and cell-type dependent manner. Two examples illustrate these findings: the epigenetic regulation of the adult rover-sitter foraging-related phenotypes by G9a, a histone methyltransferase, and the regulation of differences in the latency of rover compared to sitter larval escape responses to noxious stimuli such as parasitoid wasps. Our work provides a nuanced picture of the molecular basis of foraging’s pleiotropy.