The Drosophila Synthetic Population Resource (DSPR) is designed for the genetic dissection of complex traits. It represents a collection of recombinant inbred lines (RILs) derived from two synthetic populations (A and B), each created from eight inbred founder strains; seven unique to a population and one common to both populations.
The recombinant inbred lines (RILs) were generated from two synthetic populations. Each synthetic population was derived from a set of 8 inbred wildtype stocks that were free of P transposable elements. The two synthetic populations (A and B) share one founder in common, thus overall the two populations are constructed from 15 founder strains. In the first generation, the 8 founder stocks were crossed in a round-robin mating scheme to bring all founder alleles together. The populations were subsequently maintained as large, random-mating cohorts for 50 generations, at which point 750 RILs were created from each synthetic population by 25 generations of full-sib mating. The genome of each RIL is a fine-scale mosaic of segments from the 8 initial founder lines.
The 15 founder strains were each sequenced to 50X via Illumina short-read sequencing (paired-end 54bp reads), and reads were aligned to the D. melanogaster reference sequence to identify variants segregating in the DSPR. Roughly 10,000 markers were then genotyped in the panel of DSPR RILs using a highly-multiplexed RAD-seq (restriction-site associated DNA sequencing) genotyping-by-sequencing analysis. Combined with the founder sequencing data, the RIL genotyping data enabled each recombinant chromosomal segment in each RIL to be traced back to the founder of origin with high confidence.
