Environmental Stress Responses and Biological Interactions Investigated in the Drosophila Model System

When organisms are faced with changes in their environment, they are forced to respond, if they are to maintain optimal function. Especially ectotherms must deal with environmental changes in e.g. temperature on a regular basis, and thus their survival and reproductive success depend on their ability to respond on a behavioral, physiological, morphological and/or evolutionary level according to the environmental cues.
At the same time, if populations are small and fragmented, and have limited gene flow, environmental change and environmental stress might interact with intrinsic genetic stress such as inbreeding and genetic drift, which can exacerbate the effects of one or more environmental stresses. Furthermore, inbred populations often have low genetic variation that might constrain evolutionary responses to rapidly changing environments.
This thesis investigates how, and to what extent, insect model species respond to a multitude of different environmental stresses, how the environment interacts with the genetic composition of individuals, and lastly the consequences of low effective population size on the adaptive ability, and how to possible alleviate some of the negative fitness effects of inbreeding and loss of genetic variation by means of genetic rescue.