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Ian Dworkin

@idworkin.bsky.social
2.4K followers 565 following 92 posts

Evolutionary biologist in love with morphology, especially size & shape. Drosophila Quantitative/Statistical geneticist. Dabbler in Development. Occasional genomicist. Thinking about variation in cell size a lot lately. dworkinlab.github.io

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Ian Dworkin @idworkin.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
But one very cool result was we had was a weakly penetrant effect when knocking down the gene grain in D. melanogaster, that phenocopied (at least partially) the leg phenotype of D. prolongata. We are doing additional investigations of this right now!
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Ian Dworkin @idworkin.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
We did RNAi knockdown of these genes in Drosophila melanogaster, and several had quantitative impacts consistent with expectations.
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Ian Dworkin @idworkin.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Nonetheless, we identified a number of "candidate" genes with interesting changes in expression.
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Ian Dworkin @idworkin.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
What did we find? Many cool things! Please read the paper! doi.org/10.1093/evol.... But a few key things. First, the overall variation in gene expression in these tissue at this developmental time point does not seem to suggest these tissues have profound changes in gene expression yet.
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Ian Dworkin @idworkin.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Here are what the three species legs look like as adults. academic.oup.com/view-large/f...
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Ian Dworkin @idworkin.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Drosophila prolongata is a rarity amongst species in the melanogaster sub-group (~175 species) with male biased overall size, and exaggerated legs used as weapons and ornaments. Here is another wonderful picture. This one is from the amazing image database from gompel.org/images-2/dro...
Image of an adult Drosophila prolongata male adult. Dorsal view. Clear view of the exaggerated forelegs.
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Ian Dworkin @idworkin.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
I am excited to tell you about our new study led by Tyler Audet and in collaboration with Stefan Lüpold's group. Below you see two species. On the right is Drosophila melanogaster. On the left, Drosophila prolongata. Notice the highly exaggerated legs of the males in D.p! doi.org/10.1093/evol...
Two panel image of Drosophila prolongata and Drosophila melanogaster. In the top panel is a female of Drosophila prolongata on the left and a female of Drosophila melanogaster on the right. It shows that D. prolongata females are somewhat larger than melanogaster, and have spotted wings. Importantly the legs are proportional in each species.

In the bottom panel are males. On the left is a Drosophila prolongata male which is larger than all the other individuals, and has highly exaggerated legs in terms of width and length, and also has black stripes. In contrast male Drosophila melanogaster are much smaller than all the others, with normally proportioned legs.
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Ian Dworkin @idworkin.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
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Ian Dworkin @idworkin.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
I hope this works ( @vdveenb.bsky.social @bbolker.bsky.social )
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Ian Dworkin @idworkin.bsky.social · 08/09/2023
Don't answer that. I know the answer is always pictures of my puppy sleeping
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