Molecules and Cells

Korean Society for Molecular and Cellular Biology (한국분자세포생물학회)
권호 표지

Temporal and Spatial Expression of Homeotic Genes Is Important for Segment-specific Neuroblast 6-4 Lineage Formation in Drosophila

  • Kang, Sun-Young (Department of Biology Education, Seoul National University) ;
  • Kim, Su-Na (Department of Biology Education, Seoul National University) ;
  • Kim, Sang Hee (Department of Chemistry, Konkuk University) ;
  • Jeon, Sang-Hak (Department of Biology Education, Seoul National University)
  • Received : 2006.05.12
  • Accepted : 2006.06.19
  • Published : 2006.06.30
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Abstract

Different proliferation of neuroblast 6-4 (NB6-4) in the thorax and abdomen produces segmental specific expression pattern of several neuroblast marker genes. NB6-4 is divided to form four medialmost cell body glia (MM-CBG) per segment in thorax and two MM-CBG per segment in abdomen. As homeotic genes determine the identities of embryonic segments along the A/P axis, we investigated if temporal and specific expression of homeotic genes affects MM-CBG patterns in thorax and abdomen. A Ubx loss-of-function mutation was found to hardly affect MM-CBG formation, whereas abd-A and Abd-B caused the transformation of abdominal MM-CBG to their thoracic counterparts. On the other hand, gain-of-function mutants of Ubx, abd-A and Abd-B genes reduced the number of thoracic MM-CBG, indicating that thoracic MM-CBG resembled abdominal MM-CBG. However, mutations in Polycomb group (PcG) genes, which are negative transregulators of homeotic genes, did not cause the thoracic to abdominal MM-CBG pattern transformation although the number of MM-CBG in a few percent of embryos were partially reduced or abnormally patterned. Our results indicate that temporal and spatial expression of the homeotic genes is important to determine segmental-specificity of NB6-4 daughter cells along the anterior-posterior (A/P) axis.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

Supported by : Korean Science and Engineering Foundation (KOSEF)

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