Eniolaye Balogun, PhD student, first 1st authored paper published by Molecular Biology and Evolution
Eniolaye Balogun, PhD student from Ness Lab published her first 1st authored paper: The effects of de novo mutation on gene expression and the consequences for fitness in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii in Molecular Biology and Evolution
https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msae035
Mutation is the ultimate source of genetic variation and predicting the phenotypic consequences of these new mutations remains a challenge in biology. A potential link between the genotype and phenotype is the effects of mutations on gene expression. But the variation in gene expression created by de novo mutation and the fitness consequences of mutational changes to expression remain relatively unexplored. Here, we investigate the effects of >2600 de novo mutations on gene expression across the transcriptome of 28 mutation accumulation lines derived from two independent wild-type genotypes of the green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. We observed that the amount of genetic variance in the expression of each gene created by mutation (Vm) was similar to the variance that mutation generates in typical polygenic phenotypic traits and approximately 15-fold the variance seen in the limited species where Vm in gene expression has been estimated. Despite the clear effect of mutation on expression, we did not observe a simple additive effect of mutation on expression change. We therefore inferred the distribution of expression effects of new mutations to connect the number of mutations to the number of differentially expressed genes (DEGs). Our inferred DEE is highly L-shaped with 95% of mutations causing 0-1 DEG while the remaining 5% are spread over a long tail of large effect mutations that cause multiple genes to change expression. Lastly, we show that there is a negative correlation with the extent of expression divergence from the ancestor and fitness, providing direct evidence of the deleterious effects of perturbing gene expression.
Eniolaye Balogun is a PhD student in the Ness lab. She studies the contribution of mutation to genetic variation through gene expression using the single-cell haploid green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. She enjoys yoga and cooking
