Preprint describes contribution of Drosophila double-knockdown assay to understanding 16p11.2 deletion syndrome

Pervasive epistasis in cell proliferation pathways modulates neurodevelopmental defects of autism-associated 16p11.2 deletion

Janani Iyer, Mayanglambam Dhruba Singh, Matthew Jensen, Payal Patel, Lucilla Pizzo, Emily Huber, Haley Koerselman, Alexis T. Weiner, Paola Lepanto, Komal Vadodaria, Alexis Kubina, Qingyu Wang, Abigail Talbert, Sneha Yennawar, Jose Badano, J. Robert Manak, Melissa M. Rolls, Arjun Krishnan, Santhosh Girirajan

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/20/185355

From the abstract: "We used RNA interference in Drosophila melanogaster to evaluate the phenotype, function, and interactions of conserved 16p11.2 homologs ... Leveraging the Drosophila eye for studying gene interactions, we performed 561 pairwise knockdowns of gene expression, and identified 24 interactions between 16p11.2 homologs ... and 62 interactions with other neurodevelopmental genes ... Overall, these results point towards a new model for pathogenicity of rare CNVs, where CNV genes interact with each other in conserved pathways to modulate expression of the neurodevelopmental phenotype."