Larval and adult abdominal defects resulting from microcautery of blastoderm staged Drosophila embryos.

Drosophila embryos were damaged by microcautery at the cellular blastoderm stage at the sites of presumptive histoblasts, identified from fate maps. The resulting adults were analyzed for abnormal abdominal structures in one series, and in two further series the pupal cases of the defective adults which hatched were also checked for irregularities in segmentation of the larva, both dorsally and ventrally. The relationships between the larval segmentation and adult pattern are described. A sample of pupal cases of morphologically normal flies hatching from microcautery were checked and showed that regulation only rarely occurred, i.e., abnormal larvae sometimes produced normal adults. Both tergite and sternite defects occurred, and duplications of parts of these structures were observed in both cases. In general, abnormal fusions, missing hemi-segments, and partial deletions were associated with larval defects and were therefore probably the result of damage to larval cells, or both larval cells and histoblasts. Duplications and partial segment deficiencies also resulted from apparantly normal pupal cases and were therefore probably the result of directly damaging the presumptive histoblast cells of the blastoderm. It is suggested that the various nests of histoblasts in each segment act as one morphogenetic field, with larval cells within the field.