Iron Induced Changes in ACC and Lipid Metabolism in Drosophila - Poster by Alyssa Ware and Jenna Nii Bio11A Fall 25

[alyssaware]

What I Did
We reanalyzed a public RNA-sequencing dataset from iron-treated Drosophila melanogaster to study how iron affects lipid metabolism. We compared gene expression between control and iron-treated samples and found a region-specific increase in acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACC) expression, while ATP citrate lyase (ATPCL) remained relatively unchanged. We also used Gene Ontology enrichment analysis to show that iron-responsive genes were enriched for lipid metabolic processes , supporting the idea that iron selectively regulates lipid synthesis rather than causing broad metabolic changes.

How You Can Help
This project represents an early step in exploring how iron influences lipid metabolism in Drosophila. It is exciting because understanding conserved iron-dependent metabolic regulation could eventually help inform research in metabolic disease and cancer biology. I welcome feedback on the interpretation of these results, ideas for additional analyses or experiments, and suggestions for how this work could be expanded using other datasets, model systems, or translational approaches.

[jenna.nii]

Jenna Nii (co author)

We picked 2 genes (acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACC) and ATP citrate lyase (ATPCL)) in Drosophila Melanogaster to see how the iron region in the midgut affects lipid metabolism. As shown in figure 2 the iron region of ACC had a significant expression while in figure 3 the ATPCL did not have such a large difference in expression. This proved that iron does not broadly up-regulate all lipid metabolism enzymes but that it still plays a key role in fatty acid synthesis.