Lucia, Brisbane, Queensland Australia. The small heat shock gene shsp cluster of Drosophila buzzatii was sequenced and the gene order and DNA sequence were compared with those of the shsps in Drosophila melanogaster. The D. A phylogenetic tree was constructed based on hsp26 genes from several Drosophila species of the Sophophora and Drosophila subgenera. Only the latter contain a duplicated hsp Comparing the gene organisation of the shsp cluster shows that all the Drosophila subgenus species contain the inversion.
Putative heat shock elements HSE were found in the promoters of all the shsp and putative regulator elements for tissue specific expression were found in the promoter of hsp23 , hsp27 and one of the hsp26 genes.
The duplicated hsp26 gene in D. The allele frequencies of these variants were determined in nine D. The allele frequencies of one of the hsp23 variants showed a significant linear regression with longitude and the pooled frequency of the four Valine changes of hsp23 in the nine populations showed a significant linear regression with longitude and with a composite measure of climatic variables. The online version of this article doi The cactophilic species Drosophila buzzatii has a wide geographical distribution, and it breeds and feeds on decaying tissues of Opuntia cacti.
Several studies on this species have described latitudinal and altitudinal variation in different traits longevity, fecundity, senescence, stress resistance and chromosome polymorphism; Hasson et al.
However, variation of candidate genes for traits associated with climatic adaptation has only rarely been studied.
