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Since the dawn of the field, it has been a prime goal in genetics to understand the mechanistic basis of variation across wild individuals. As we map loci underlying a trait of interest, the emergent genes can be of immediate use as targets for diagnostics and drugs, and can shed light on the principles of evolution. The industry standard toward this end is to test for a relationship between genotype and phenotype across a population via linkage or association1. Powerful as these approaches are, they have one key limitation—they rely on large panels of recombinant progeny from crosses between interfertile individuals. They are of no use in the study of species that cannot mate to form progeny in the first place. As such, the field has had little capacity for unbiased dissection of trait differences between reproductively isolated species2.
In this work we report the technical underpinnings of a new method, RH-seq3, for genome-scale surveys of the genetic basis of trait variation between species. This approach is a massively parallel version of the reciprocal hemizygote test4,5, which was first conceived as a way to evaluate the phenotypic effects of allelic differences between two genetically distinct backgrounds at a particular locus (Figure 1A). In this scheme, the two divergent individuals are first mated to form a hybrid, half of whose genome comes from each of the respective parents. In this background, multiple strains are generated, each containing an interrupted or deleted copy of each parent’s allele of the locus. These strains are hemizygous since they remain diploid everywhere in the genome except at the locus of interest, where they are considered haploid, and are referred to as reciprocal since each lacks only one parent’s allele, with its remaining allele derived from the other parent. By comparing the phenotypes of these reciprocal hemizygote strains, one can conclude whether DNA sequence variants at the manipulated locus contribute to the trait of interest, since variants at the locus are the only genetic difference between the reciprocal hemizygote strains. In this way, it is possible to link genetic differences between species to a phenotypic difference between them in a well-controlled experimental setup. To date the applications of this test have been in a candidate-gene framework—that is, cases in which the hypothesis is already in hand that natural variation at a candidate locus might impact a trait.
In what follows, we lay out the protocol for a genome-scale reciprocal hemizygosity screen, using yeast as a model system. Our method creates a genomic complement of hemizygote mutants, by generating viable, sterile F1 hybrids between species and subjecting them to transposon mutagenesis. We pool the hemizygotes, measure their phenotypes in sequencing-based assays, and test for differences in frequency between clones of the pool bearing the two parents’ alleles of a given gene. The result is a catalog of loci at which variants between species influence the trait of interest. We implement the RH-seq workflow to elucidate the genetic basis of thermotolerance differences between two budding yeast species, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and S. paradoxus, which diverged ~5 million years ago6.