FlyMove – a new way to look at development of Drosophila
Development of any organism requires a complex interplay of genes to orchestrate the many movements needed to build up an embryo. Previously, work on Drosophila melanogaster has provided important insights that are often applicable in other systems. But developmental processes, which take place in space and time, are difficult to convey in textbooks. Here, we introduce FlyMove (http://flymove.uni-muenster.de), a new database combining movies, animated schemata, interactive "modules" and pictures that will greatly facilitate the understanding of Drosophila development.
Number, identity, and sequence of the Drosophila head segments as revealed by neural elements and their deletion patterns in mutants.
The development of the insect head tagma involves massive rearrangements and secondary fusions of segment anlagen during embryogenesis. Due to the lack of reliable morphological markers, the number, identity, and sequence of the head segments, particularly in the pregnathal region, are still a matter of ongoing debates. We examined the complex array of internal structures of the embryonic Drosophila melanogaster head such as the sensory structures and nerves of the peripheral and stomatogastric nervous systems, and we used embryonic head mutations causing a lack of overlapping segment anlagen to unravel the segmental identity and the sequence of the neural elements. Our results provide evid…