A nematode-specific gene underlies bleomycin-response variation in Caenorhabditis elegans

Shannon C. Brady; Stefan Zdraljevic; Karol W. Bisaga; Robyn E. Tanny; Daniel E. Cook; Daehan Lee; Ye Wang; Erik C. Andersen

Therefore, scb-1 expression differences might cause the bleomycin-response variation between 608 . CC-BY 4.0 International license is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It . https://doi.org/10.1101/565218 doi: bioRxiv preprint the parental strains. We performed RNA-seq of the N2 and CB4856 strains to assess scb-1 609 expression differences between the parental strains and did not identify a significant increase in 610 expression in the CB4856 strain ( Figure S13 , File S16, p = 0.20, Wald test; p = 0.17, likelihood 611 ratio test). This result could be caused by the low sample size (n = 3) in the RNA-seq 612 experiment, or the RIAIL strains could have a novel variant that arose during strain construction 613 that causes scb-1 expression variation. Alternatively, the expression difference observed in the 614 RIAIL strains could be attributed to epistatic loci. We performed a two-factor genome scan to 615 identify epistatic loci that underlie scb-1 expression variation in the RIAILs and identified two 616 significant interactions: one between loci on chromosomes IV and X and another between loci on 617 chromosomes II and V ( Figure S14 , File S17). This result might suggest that epistatic loci 618 underlie scb-1 expression variation in the RIAILs and could explain why scb-1 expression is not 619 variable in the parental strains. 620