Description
Natural populations of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, segregate genetic variation that leads to cardiac disease phenotypes. Drosophila is well-known as a model for studying the mechanisms by which human disease genes cause pathology, including heart disease, but it is less well appreciated that they may also model the genetic architecture of disease, since flies presumably also have diseases that have a genetic basis. It is reasoned that most of these aberrant inbred line effects would be due to capture of rare variants of large effect as homozygotes, allowing the variants to be mapped rapidly using contemporary genomic approaches.