Lawrence P A, Johnston P
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK.
Development. 1989 Dec;107(4):847-53. doi: 10.1242/dev.107.4.847.
We report the first attempt of its kind to study genetic interactions using young Drosophila embryos that are mosaic for wildtype and mutant cells. Using nuclear transplantation we make mosaic embryos in which a patch of cells lacks a particular segmentation gene, A. With antibodies, we than look at the expression of another gene that is known to be downstream of gene A, with respect to the cells in the patch. We have examples of patches of hairy cells (where we monitor the effect on fushi tarazu (ftz) expression), even-skipped (monitoring ftz) and ftz (monitoring engrailed and Ultrabithorax). Our main finding is that the dependence of engrailed expression on the ftz gene is strictly cell-autonomous. This result goes some way towards explaining the dependence of Ultrabithorax expression on ftz, a dependence we show to be locally cell-autonomous within parts of parasegments 6 and 8 but non autonomous within parasegment 7.
我们报告了首次尝试利用野生型和突变细胞嵌合的年轻果蝇胚胎来研究基因相互作用。通过核移植，我们制作了嵌合胚胎，其中一小片细胞缺失特定的体节基因A。然后，我们使用抗体观察另一个已知位于基因A下游的基因在这片细胞中的表达情况。我们有毛细胞区域的例子（在此区域我们监测对分节基因ftz表达的影响）、偶数跳变区域（监测ftz）以及ftz区域（监测engrailed和超双胸基因）。我们的主要发现是，engrailed基因表达对ftz基因的依赖性严格是细胞自主的。这一结果在一定程度上解释了超双胸基因表达对ftz的依赖性，我们发现这种依赖性在第6和第8副节的部分区域是局部细胞自主的，但在第7副节内是非自主的。
