What fruit flies can reveal about stress and inheritance
Doctoral research in the College of Sciences and Mathematics examines how environmental stress shapes recombination
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Melika Shiran presented her research on recombination and environmental stress during a poster session at the Drosophila Research Conference.
In Auburn’s Department of Biological Sciences, one lab is studying genetic change at a striking scale.
For doctoral student Melika Shiran, that means fruit fly experiments that can include nearly 30,000 flies and more than 100,000 eggs. Her NIH-funded research focuses on recombination, the process during meiosis in which genetic material is rearranged, creating new combinations of traits in offspring.
“We’re looking at how stressful environments affect recombination,” Shiran said. “The question is not just whether it changes, but whether those changes are actually adaptive.”
In the lab of biological sciences professor Laurie Stevison, answering that question requires both precision and volume. Researchers track subtle shifts in genetic outcomes across conditions, using sample sizes large enough to reveal patterns that would be difficult to detect in smaller studies.
That work builds on a broader idea in genetics: environmental conditions can influence not just which traits are favored, but how genetic variation is produced in the first place.
“Recombination is one of the ways organisms produce variation,” Shiran said. “If that process changes under stress, it could have important implications for how populations respond to changing environments.”
But the answer is not always straightforward.
Shiran and colleagues presented their work at the 67th International Drosophila Research Conference, one of the field’s largest annual meetings.
Although the lab has found evidence that recombination can shift under stress, Shiran said those changes do not necessarily mean the response is beneficial.
“It’s easy to assume that if something changes under stress, it must be adaptive,” she said. “But that’s not always the case. We’re trying to understand the mechanisms behind those changes and whether they actually help the organism.”
To study that question, the lab relies on fruit flies, a long-established model in genetics. Their short life cycles and well-mapped genomes make them especially useful for studying recombination across many generations and conditions.
In Stevison’s lab, that model system is paired with a collaborative research structure. Large experiments require multiple people working together, from maintaining fly stocks to collecting and analyzing data. Undergraduate researchers are a key part of that process, contributing to experiments and, in some cases, presenting findings at conferences.
“The scale of the work means we rely on a team,” Shiran said. “Undergraduates are involved in real parts of the project, not just observing.”
Researchers work alongside doctoral student Melika Shiran in Laurie Stevison’s lab, contributing to large-scale fruit fly experiments.
In March, Shiran and her team presented their latest findings at the 67th International Drosophila Conference, one of the largest scientific gatherings in the field. That work also points to the lab’s next set of questions. Her next phase of research will focus on the mechanisms behind these shifts in recombination, using gene expression data to examine how biological responses change under different environmental conditions. The goal is to move from observing patterns to explaining them.
“We’ve seen that recombination can change,” she said. “Now we want to understand why.”
Across thousands of flies and carefully tracked data, the lab is building a clearer picture of how stressful environments can alter the process that helps create genetic variation.
