TY - JOUR
T1 - Establishment of developmental precision and proportions in the early Drosophila embryo
AU - Houchmandzadeh, Bahram
AU - Wieschaus, Eric
AU - Leibler, Stanislas
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank H.-S. V. Chen for discussions and T. Ciabarra and M. Forcina for preliminary work. Monoclonal antibody K35/40 was made in collaboration with J. S. Trimmer and N. J. Sucher. NR1 and NR2A cDNAs were gifts of S. F. Heinemann and S. Nakanishi, respectively. This work was supported in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health. S.A.L. and D.Z. are co-senior authors.
Funding Information:
Drosophila alleles were a gift from C. Desplan (FRT-hb,nosBN), E. Gavis (stauD3) and Nusslein–Volhard lab stock (staur9). This work has been partially supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Discussions with C. Desplan, J. Grosshans, T. Lecuit, J. Reinitz and S. Small are here acknowledged.
PY - 2002/2/14
Y1 - 2002/2/14
N2 - During embryonic development, orderly patterns of gene expression eventually assign each cell in the embryo its particular fate. For the anteroposterior axis of the Drosophila embryo, the first step in this process depends on a spatial gradient of the maternal morphogen Bicoid (Bcd). Positional information of this gradient is transmitted to downstream gap genes, each occupying a well defined spatial domain. We determined the precision of the initial process by comparing expression domains in different embryos. Here we show that the Bcd gradient displays a high embryo-to-embryo variability, but that this noise in the positional information is strongly decreased ('filtered') at the level of hunchback (hb) gene expression. In contrast to the Bcd gradient, the hb expression pattern already includes the information about the scale of the embryo. We show that genes known to interact directly with Hb are not responsible for its spatial precision, but that the maternal gene staufen may be crucial.
AB - During embryonic development, orderly patterns of gene expression eventually assign each cell in the embryo its particular fate. For the anteroposterior axis of the Drosophila embryo, the first step in this process depends on a spatial gradient of the maternal morphogen Bicoid (Bcd). Positional information of this gradient is transmitted to downstream gap genes, each occupying a well defined spatial domain. We determined the precision of the initial process by comparing expression domains in different embryos. Here we show that the Bcd gradient displays a high embryo-to-embryo variability, but that this noise in the positional information is strongly decreased ('filtered') at the level of hunchback (hb) gene expression. In contrast to the Bcd gradient, the hb expression pattern already includes the information about the scale of the embryo. We show that genes known to interact directly with Hb are not responsible for its spatial precision, but that the maternal gene staufen may be crucial.
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U2 - 10.1038/415798a
DO - 10.1038/415798a
M3 - Article
C2 - 11845210
AN - SCOPUS:0037075022
SN - 0028-0836
VL - 415
SP - 798
EP - 802
JO - Nature
JF - Nature
IS - 6873
ER -