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Project

Is inbreeding and inbreeding depression associated with epigenetic regulation? – a case study using Daphnia as a model

Inbreeding results when related individuals mate. This may, for instance, occur when populations have become small, often the case for (locally) threatened species. Inbreeding is often associated with a lowered fitness (inbreeding depression; Bijlsma et al. 2000; Hedrick & Kalinowski 2000) and its occurrence has therefore important evolutionary implications. Recent work on plants has revealed that inbred lineages often show increased levels of DNA methylation, one of the key mechanisms of epigenetic regulation. Moreover, there is evidence that this epigenetic regulation may be associated with observed inbreeding depression (Pennisi, 2011; Vergeer et al. 2012). Here we want to test whether similarly inbreeding is associated with increased methylation in the water flea Daphnia. Daphnia is a very convenient model system for this work because of its cyclic parthenogenetic life cycle allowing clonal lineages, its short generation time which facilitates multiple-generation studies, and the ease of culture and fitness quantification. Using Daphnia as a model system, we have the opportunity to take this line of research to a next stage. We will quantify whether (1) inbreeding leads to increased levels of methylation, (2) this effect differs across families and populations, (3) this effect decays from generation to generation, (4) increased methylation in inbreds is the cause of inbreeding depression, (5) methylation levels upon inbreeding differ depending on genomic region.

Date:1 Jan 2015 →  31 Dec 2017
Keywords:epigenetische regulatie
Disciplines:Plant biology