These authors examined the genome sizes of many populations around the world of each of 6 species of drosophilid flies. Most species did not show differences between continents in genome size as measured by flow cytometry, except that populations of Drosophila melanogaster from east Africa, where this species is thought to have originated, had smaller genomes.
The methods of this paper are substantially the same as the basic protocol described in Nardon et al. (2003), apparently using the “best practices” (my own terminology) discovered in that earlier work.
I quote here the most important, in my mind, sentence in this paper:
“Because D. melanogaster is thought to have colonized the entire globe a long time ago, whereas D. simulans is thought to have dispersed more recently, this suggests that the time since colonization occurred may matter, and that change in genome size, when it happens, is a very slow process.”
This paper is not cited by me in my PhD proposal, an oversight that seems obvious now that I have read this paper. The note after the literature cited section, describing this paper in the context of a larger project on genome size evolution, suggests I should periodically search for new papers by these authors on this and related topics.
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