Autoregulation of the Drosophila disconnected gene in the developing visual system

作者：Lee KJ^*; Mukhopadhyay M; Pelka P; Campos AR; Steller H

来源：Developmental Biology, 1999, 214(2): 385-398.

DOI：10.1006/dbio.1999.9420

• Drosophila melanogaster
• neural development
• zinc finger proteins
• gene expression
• autoregulation

The Drosophila disconnected (disco) gene is required for the formation of appropriate connections between the larval optic nerve and its target cells in the brain. The disco gene encodes a nuclear protein with two zinc fingers, which suggests that the gene product is a transcription factor. Here, we present data supporting this notion. We find that disco expression in the optic lobe primordium, a group of cells contacted by the developing optic nerve, depends on an autoregulatory feedback loop. We show that wild-type disco function is required for maintenance of disco mRNA and protein expression in the developing optic lobe. In addition, we demonstrate that ubiquitous Disco activity supplied by a heat-inducible gene construct activates expression from the endogenous disco gene specifically in the optic lobe primordium. Consistent with a role of Disco as a transcriptional regulatory protein, we show that portions of the Disco protein are capable of activating the transcription of reporter constructs in a heterologous system. Moreover, we find that the zinc finger portion of Disco binds in vitro to sequences located near

• 出版日期1999-10-15