Boulay J L, Dennefeld C, Alberga A
Laboratoire de Génétique Moléculaire des Eucaryotes du CNRS, Faculté de Médecine, Strasbourg, France.
Nature. 1987;330(6146):395-8. doi: 10.1038/330395a0.
Pattern formation in the Drosophila embryo requires the concerted expression of maternal and zygotic genes. At least nineteen genes, twelve of which are maternally expressed, are involved in the establishment of dorsal-ventral polarity. Mutations in any one of these genes result in distinct alterations of cell fates and in the formation of an abnormal dorsal-ventral pattern. Mutants of the 'dorsal group', eleven of the maternal genes, have a common recessive phenotype similar to that described for dorsal, in that cells located at ventral and lateral positions assume dorsal fates and ventral structures fail to develop. Thus the dorsal group gene products may be involved in the establishment of a gradient of positional information along the dorsal-ventral axis. We have cloned snail (sna), a zygotic gene, whose expression is essential for the correct specification of dorsal-ventral pattern. In this report, we present evidence that the complementary DNA-deduced protein product of sna contains five copies of a nucleic acid-binding finger motif previously identified in two transcription factors, and in the protein product of several putative regulatory genes.
果蝇胚胎中的模式形成需要母体基因和合子基因的协同表达。至少有19个基因参与背腹极性的建立，其中12个是母体表达的。这些基因中任何一个发生突变都会导致细胞命运的明显改变，并形成异常的背腹模式。“背侧组”的11个母体基因的突变体具有与背侧基因相似的常见隐性表型，即位于腹侧和外侧位置的细胞呈现背侧命运，腹侧结构无法发育。因此，背侧组基因产物可能参与了沿背腹轴的位置信息梯度的建立。我们克隆了合子基因蜗牛（sna），其表达对于背腹模式的正确指定至关重要。在本报告中，我们提供证据表明，sna的互补DNA推导的蛋白质产物包含先前在两种转录因子以及几种假定的调控基因的蛋白质产物中鉴定出核酸结合指基序的五个拷贝。
