AbstractThe importance of high and low temperature tolerance in adaptation to changing environmental conditions has evoked new interest in modulations in gene expression and metabolism linked with stress tolerance. We investigated the effects of rapid cold hardening and cold acclimatization on the chill coma recovery times of two Drosophila virilis group species, Drosophila montana and D. virilis, with different distributions and utilized a candidate gene approach to trace changes in their gene expression during and after the cold treatments. The study showed that cold acclimatization clearly decreases chill coma recovery times in both species, whereas rapid cold hardening did not have a significant effect. Microarray analysis revealed several genes showing expression changes during different stages of cold response. Amongst the 219 genes studied, two genes showed rather consistent expression changes: hsr‐omega, which was up‐regulated in both study species during cold acclimatization, and Eip71CD, which was down‐regulated in nearly all of the cold treatments. In addition, 29 genes showed expression changes that were more treatment‐ and/or species specific. Overall, different stages of cold response elicited changes mainly in genes involved in heat shock response, circadian rhythm and metabolism.