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Published April 24, 1987 | public
Journal Article

Molecular characterization and expression of sevenless, a gene involved in neuronal pattern formation in the Drosophila eye

Abstract

The Drosophila sevenless mutation results in lack of a single neuron (photoreceptor cell R7) in every ommatidium of the compound eye; the developmental defect occurs in the larval eye disc. We created P-element-induced alleles and used them to isolate the sev gene. An 8.2 kb transcript is expressed in the eye disc, behind the morphogenetic furrow, coincident with recruitment and differentiation of photoreceptor clusters. The transcript becomes localized at the apical surface, persists in the prepupa, and fades out at pupation. It is again detected in the adult head. In some alleles the 8.2 kb transcript is absent. In others, the transcript is expressed, in spite of the absence of cell R7. Localization of the gene product in the eye disc was obtained with antibody raised against sev protein.

Additional Information

© 1987 Cell Press. Received 21 January 1987, Revised 23 February 1987. We are grateful to M. Anderson, E. Eichenberger. J. Mao, and R. Young for excellent technical assistance. We thank R. Hackett, D. Ballinger, B. Rabin, and D. Hyde for their generous advice and review of the manuscript. We are indebted to W. Benz and W. Engels for the P-stocks, to I. Zhimulev for deficiency stocks, to F. Gerresheim and D. Ready for sending their sev alleles, to P Salvaterra and M. Palazzolo for cDNA libraries, to C. A. Kamb for genomic libraries and helpful discussions, to O. Siddiqi and M. Song for help with some of the experiments, to S. L. Zipursky and K. Vijay Raghavan for many suggestions, and to H. K. Mitchell for his help at many stages of the work. We thank E. Hafen and G. M. Rubin for communicating their results prior to publication. This work was supported by a grant to S. 8. (DCB-8409366) by the National Science Foundation. U. B. was supported by the Del Webb Foundation and is currently a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Fellow of the Life Sciences Research Foundation. P. R. was supported in part by a National Research Service Award (1 T32GM07616) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. J. P. was supported by a National Research Service Award (EY05636) from the National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health. The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked "advertisement" in accordance with 16 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023