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Published September 1, 2013 | Accepted Version + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Size-dependent regulation of dorsal–ventral patterning in the early Drosophila embryo

Abstract

How natural variation in embryo size affects patterning of the Drosophila embryo dorsal–ventral (DV) axis is not known. Here we examined quantitatively the relationship between nuclear distribution of the Dorsal transcription factor, boundary positions for several target genes, and DV axis length. Data were obtained from embryos of a wild-type background as well as from mutant lines inbred to size select embryos of smaller or larger sizes. Our data show that the width of the nuclear Dorsal gradient correlates with DV axis length. In turn, for some genes expressed along the DV axis, the boundary positions correlate closely with nuclear Dorsal levels and with DV axis length; while the expression pattern of others is relatively constant and independent of the width of the Dorsal gradient. In particular, the patterns of snail (sna) and ventral nervous system defective (vnd) correlate with nuclear Dorsal levels and exhibit scaling to DV length; while the pattern of intermediate neuroblasts defective (ind) remains relatively constant with respect to changes in Dorsal and DV length. However, in mutants that exhibit an abnormal expansion of the Dorsal gradient which fails to scale to DV length, only sna follows the Dorsal distribution and exhibits overexpansion; in contrast, vnd and ind do not overexpand suggesting some additional mechanism acts to refine the dorsal boundaries of these two genes. Thus, our results argue against the idea that the Dorsal gradient works as a global system of relative coordinates along the DV axis and suggest that individual targets respond to changes in embryo size in a gene-specific manner.

Additional Information

© 2013 Elsevier Inc. Received 9 May 2013. Received in revised form 12 June 2013. Accepted 14 June 2013. Available online 22 June 2013. We are very grateful to C. Miles for helpful discussions and for sharing fly stocks, and we also thank Young Bae and Anil Ozdemir for comments on the manuscript. This work was supported from Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral fellowship to G.T.R. and by NIH Grant GM077668 and ARRA supplement to A.S. Author contributions: M.N. and A.S. conceived the project; M.N., G.T.R., and M.G. designed the protocol; M.G., M.N., and A.S. designed the experimental approach; M.G. and M.N. performed experiments; G.T.R. and M.N. developed analytical tools; M.G. and G.T.R. conducted the data analysis; M.N., M.G., G.T.R. and A.S. wrote the paper.

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Supplemental Material - mmc1.doc

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
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October 24, 2023