What is this mutation called?

These fruit flies have a sex-linked recessive eye color mutation. The color ranges from nearly normal to orange to white. I had a hard time differentiating the 'orange' and other dark ones from the wildtype: to figure out whether a particular fly was a mutant or a wildtype, I looked for the dark spots on the eyes (normally present in wildtypes, they were absent in our mutants).

Any ideas of what this mutation is called?

2008-12-12T13:07:40Z

John Galt, My teacher did indeed indicate that the many mutant phenotypes were all related (so, presumably, all affected by the changes to the same pathway, just to different degrees).

What I'm trying to figure out is what this fruit fly is called (i.e. what name was listed when she bought this particular stock of fruit flies). Any ideas?

GrizzlyMint2008-12-12T09:11:03Z

Favorite Answer

It sounds like you have a number of different mutations. There are two biochemical pathways to look into here. There is the ommochrome pathway that produces brown pigments, and there is the pteridine pathway that produces orange pigments. In the wild type both of these pathways are functional and you get a dark redish looking eye pigment. If there is a mutation in the pteridine pathway you get brown eyes, and if there is a mutation in the ommochrome pathway you get orange eyes. If both pathways have a mutation neither pigment is produced and you get the white eyes. It can get more complicated than this though. You could have a mutation that only blocks part of a pathway and you get many possible color variations. I don't know exactly what kind of mutation it is though (point, frameshift, ect.), but I hope this helps you in some way.

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Cool Dad 172008-12-12T09:16:58Z

This is called the "white" mutation. It was the first sex-linked mutation ever discovered in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, by Thomas Hunt Morgan in 1910.

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