Excited to be in sunny San Diego for my 5th (!) fly meeting #Dros25! I will be giving a poster (329T) tomorrow on some new host-parasitoid experiments — would love to chat with interested folks!

nucleotide database was throwing errors earlier today for both me and @zzzytty.bsky.social

The tools in D. melanogaster let us dissect the role of gene regulation in mediating HGT in animals, an area not well-studied. When we expressed fusionB constitutively, instead of in the immune tissues where it is natively expressed in D. ananassae, we observed lethality at early pupal stages. (6/n)

We found that the FusionB toxin was secreted from the fat body to the host hemolymph, where it targetec the serosal tissue of parasitoids and led to increased wasp mortality by 72 hpi. To our knowledge, it is the first toxic humoral anti-parasitoid factor described in Drosophila. (5/n)

Shockingly, one of these genes, a cdtB::aip56 fusion gene we called "fusionB," drove a robust parasitoid resistance phenotype in against two different parasitoid species when expressed in D. melanogaster immune tissues! (4/n)