The complex spatio-temporal regulation of the Drosophila myoblast attractant gene duf/kirre.

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 m

SUBMITTER: Guruharsha KG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2734059 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature