How the chit-chat between genes and diet regulates lifespan 

Understanding why individuals differ from each other is a major goal in evolutionary biology. We study the genome of fruit flies to uncover which and how many genes regulate phenotypic variation, and integrate environmental perturbations to answer a key but still unresolved question: does the function of a given gene depend on the environment? Using whole-genome sequencing of thousands of individual fruit flies we identify the genes that regulate lifespan in low and high sugar diets and ask: are the genes that determine how long an individual lives the same ones in both diets?