The complex spatio-temporal regulation of the Drosophila myoblast attractant gene duf/kirre.
PLoS One
; 4(9): e6960, 2009 Sep 09.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-19742310
ABSTRACT
A key early player in the regulation of myoblast fusion is the gene dumbfounded (duf, also known as kirre). Duf must be expressed, and function, in founder cells (FCs). A fixed number of FCs are chosen from a pool of equivalent myoblasts and serve to attract fusion-competent myoblasts (FCMs) to fuse with them to form a multinucleate muscle-fibre. The spatial and temporal regulation of duf expression and function are important and play a deciding role in choice of fibre number, location and perhaps size. We have used a combination of bioinformatics and functional enhancer deletion approaches to understand the regulation of duf. By transgenic enhancer-reporter deletion analysis of the duf regulatory region, we found that several distinct enhancer modules regulate duf expression in specific muscle founders of the embryo and the adult. In addition to existing bioinformatics tools, we used a new program for analysis of regulatory sequence, PhyloGibbs-MP, whose development was largely motivated by the requirements of this work. The results complement our deletion analysis by identifying transcription factors whose predicted binding regions match with our deletion constructs. Experimental evidence for the relevance of some of these TF binding sites comes from available ChIP-on-chip from the literature, and from our analysis of localization of myogenic transcription factors with duf enhancer reporter gene expression. Our results demonstrate the complex regulation in each founder cell of a gene that is expressed in all founder cells. They provide evidence for transcriptional control--both activation and repression--as an important player in the regulation of myoblast fusion. The set of enhancer constructs generated will be valuable in identifying novel trans-acting factor-binding sites and chromatin regulation during myoblast fusion in Drosophila. Our results and the bioinformatics tools developed provide a basis for the study of the transcriptional regulation of other complex genes.
Texto completo:
1
Coleções:
01-internacional
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Regulação da Expressão Gênica no Desenvolvimento
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Proteínas de Drosophila
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Mioblastos
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Proteínas de Membrana
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Proteínas Musculares
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Músculos
Tipo de estudo:
Prognostic_studies
Limite:
Animals
Idioma:
En
Revista:
PLoS One
Assunto da revista:
CIENCIA
/
MEDICINA
Ano de publicação:
2009
Tipo de documento:
Article
País de afiliação:
Índia