Search results for "La Protein"
showing 10 items of 245 documents
Gene Regulation and Species-Specific Evolution of Free Flight Odor Tracking in Drosophila
2018
Running title: flight evolution in Drosophila This is an invited contribution to the special issue on Genetics of Adaptation based on a symposium of the same name at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (TIFR, Bangalore, India) in November 2016; International audience; The flying ability of insects has coevolved with the development of organs necessary to take-off from the ground, generate, and modulate lift during flight in complex environments. Flight orientation to the appropriate food source and mating partner depends on the perception and integration of multiple chemical signals. We used a wind tunnel-based assay to investigate the natural and molecular evolution of free flight …
Dietary rescue of altered metabolism gene reveals unexpected [i]Drosophila[/i] mating cues
2015
Running title: Dietary rescue of metabolic mutation and reproduction; To develop and reproduce, animals need long-chain Mono and PolyUnsaturated Fatty Acids (MUFAs; PUFAs). Although some UFAs can be synthesized by the organism, others must be provided by the diet. The gene desat1, involved in Drosophila melanogaster UFA metabolism, is necessary for both larval development and for adult sex pheromone communication. We first characterized desat1 expression in larval tissues. Then, we found that larvae in which desat1 expression was knocked down throughout development died during the larval stages when raised on standard food. By contrast pure MUFAs or PUFAs, but not saturated FAs, added to th…
A Mutation With Major Effects on Drosophila melanogaster Sex Pheromones
2005
0016-6731 (Print) Comparative Study Journal Article Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't; Sex pheromones are intraspecific chemical signals that are crucial for mate attraction and discrimination. In Drosophila melanogaster, the predominant hydrocarbons on the cuticle of mature female and male flies are radically different and tend to stimulate or inhibit male courtship, respectively. This sexual difference depends largely upon the number of double bonds (one in males and two in females) added by desaturase enzymes. A mutation was caused by a PGal4 transposon inserted in the desat1 gene that codes for the desaturase crucial for setting these double bonds. Homozygous mutant flies produced 70-90%…
desat1 and the Evolution of Pheromonal Communication in Drosophila
2009
1749-6632 (Electronic) 0077-8923; The evolution of communication is a fundamental biological problem. The genetic control of the signal and its reception must be tightly coadapted, especially in interindividual sexual communication. However, there is very little experimental evidence for tight genetic linkage connecting the emission of a signal and its reception. In Drosophila melanogaster, desat1 is the first known gene that simultaneously affects the emission and the perception of sex pheromones. Our experiments show that both aspects of pheromonal communication (the emission and the perception of sex pheromones) depend on distinct genetic control and may result from tissue-specific expre…
desat1: A Swiss army knife for pheromonal communication and reproduction?
2012
International audience; The desat1 gene possesses an extraordinary-maybe unique-feature in the control of sensory communication systems: it codes for the two principal and complementary aspects-the emission and the reception-of Drosophila sex pheromones. These two complex aspects depend on separate genetic control indicating that desat1 pleiotropically acts on pheromonal communication. This gene also control other characters either related to reproduction and to osmoregulation. Such a functional pleiotropy may be related to the molecular structure of desat1 gene which combines a highly conserved coding region with fast evolving regulatory regions: It produces at least five transcripts all g…
The consequences of regulation of desat1 expression for pheromone emission and detection in Drosophila melanogaster.
2010
AbstractSensory communication depends on the precise matching between the emission and the perception of sex- and species-specific signals; understanding both the coevolutionary process and the genes involved in both production and detection is a major challenge. desat1 determines both aspects of communication—a mutation in desat1 simultaneously alters both sex pheromone emission and perception in Drosophila melanogaster flies. We investigated whether the alteration of pheromonal perception is a consequence of the altered production of pheromones or if the two phenotypes are independently controlled by the same locus. Using several genetic tools, we were able to separately manipulate the tw…
Muscleblind isoforms are functionally distinct and regulate α-actinin splicing
2007
Drosophila Muscleblind (Mbl) proteins control terminal muscle and neural differentiation, but their molecular function has not been experimentally addressed. Such an analysis is relevant as the human Muscleblind-like homologs (MBNL1-3) are implicated in the pathogenesis of the inherited muscular developmental and degenerative disease myotonic dystrophy. The Drosophila muscleblind gene expresses four protein coding splice forms (mblA to mblD) that are differentially expressed during the Drosophila life cycle, and which vary markedly in their ability to rescue the embryonic lethal phenotype of muscleblind mutant flies. Analysis of muscleblind mutant embryos reveals misregulated alternative sp…
Elucidation of the regulation of an adult cuticle gene Acp65A by the transcription factor Broad.
2009
Broad (BR), an ecdysone-inducible transcription factor, is a major determinant of the pupal stage. The misexpression of BR-Z1 isoform (BR-Z1) during adult development of Drosophila melanogaster prevents the expression of the adult cuticle protein 65A gene (Acp65A). We found that the proximal 237 bp of the 5' flanking region of Acp65A were sufficient to mediate this suppression. A targeted point mutation of a putative BR-Z1 response element (BRE) within this region showed that it was not involved. Drosophila hormone receptor-like 38 (DHR38) is required for Acp65A expression. We found that BR-Z1 repressed DHR38 expression and that BR's inhibition of Acp65A expression was rescued by exogenous …
optomotor-blind suppresses instability at the A/P compartment boundary of the Drosophila wing.
2008
Formation and function of the A/P compartment boundary of the Drosophila wing have been studied intensely. The boundary prevents mingling of A and P cells, is characterized by an expression discontinuity of several genes like engrailed, Cubitus interruptus, hedgehog and decapentaplegic and is essential for patterning the wing. Compared with segmental or compartmental boundaries in several other systems which generally manifest as folds or clefts, the wing A/P boundary is morphologically inconspicuous in both the larval and adult stage. We show here that the Drosophila wing A/P boundary, too, is susceptible to fold and cleft formation and that these processes are suppressed by the T-box tran…
Linker histone H1 is essential for Drosophila development, the establishment of pericentric heterochromatin, and a normal polytene chromosome structu…
2009
We generated mutant alleles of Drosophila melanogaster in which expression of the linker histone H1 can be down-regulated over a wide range by RNAi. When the H1 protein level is reduced to ∼20% of the level in wild-type larvae, lethality occurs in the late larval – pupal stages of development. Here we show that H1 has an important function in gene regulation within or near heterochromatin. It is a strong dominant suppressor of position effect variegation (PEV). Similar to other suppressors of PEV, H1 is simultaneously involved in both the repression of euchromatic genes brought to the vicinity of pericentric heterochromatin and the activation of heterochromatic genes that depend on their pe…