The control of sexual development in Drosophila melanogaster: genetic and molecular analysis of a genetic regulatory hierarchy--a minireview.

Genetic analyses of mutants affecting the sexual development of the fruitfly, Drosophila melanogaster, have led to a genetic model that describes how the wild-type genes interact with one another as parts of a single regulatory pathway. More recent molecular studies on some of these sex differentiation regulatory genes have lent support to this genetic model, and have defined the molecular nature of some of these genetic interactions. One surprising feature of the regulatory hierarchy to emerge from these molecular studies is that many of the sex-specific genetic switches in this pathway are not transcriptional regulation events but, rather, are based on sex-specific alternative RNA processing events (pre-mRNA splicing and/or polyadenylation site selection).