dissection-immunohistochemistry-mounting-larval-adult-drosophila

Dissection, Immunohistochemistry and Mounting of Larval and Adult <em>Drosophila</em> Brains for Optic Lobe Visualization

The Drosophila optic lobe, comprised of four neuropils: the lamina, medulla, lobula and lobula plate, is an excellent model system for exploring the ...

University of Toronto - Mississauga

Combinatorial spatial and temporal patterning of stem cells is a powerful mechanism for the generation of neural diversity in insect and vertebrate nervous systems. In the developing  medulla, the neural stem cells of the outer proliferation center (OPC) are spatially patterned by the mutually exclusive expression of three homeobox transcription factors: Vsx1 in the center of the OPC crescent (cOPC), Optix in the main arms (mOPC), and Rx in the posterior tips (pOPC). These spatial factors act together with a temporal cascade of transcription factors in OPC neuroblasts to specify the greater than 80 medulla cell types. Here, we identify the enhancers that are sufficient to drive the spatially restricted expression of the  and  genes in the OPC. We show that removal of the cOPC enhancer in the  inversion mutant leads to the loss of Vsx1 expression in the cOPC. Analysis of the evolutionarily conserved sequences within these enhancers suggests that direct repression by Optix may restrict the expression of  and  to the cOPC and pOPC, respectively.

Priscilla Valentino

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