Mutation Accumulation Tools to Investigate Gene Function in Natural Daphnia Populations

The freshwater microcrustacean Daphniahas long been the subject of ecological and physiological inquiry.  We present here a tool developed to further the study of genomics in Daphnia spp.

We have developed extensive mutation accumulation (MA) lines in Daphnia.  This resource is comprised of 1000 founding individuals of clonally reproducing Daphnia evenly divided among four treatments.  Each line is bottlenecked through a single individual once per generation, allowing mutations to accumulate independently in each line over time.  Isolates in this experiment are, depending on the isolate, between generation 78-126, but the experiment is ongoing.