Fog signaling has diverse roles in epithelial morphogenesis in insects
Abstract
The Drosophila Fog pathway represents one of the best-understood signaling cascades controlling epithelial morphogenesis. During gastrulation, Fog induces apical cell constrictions that drive the invagination of mesoderm and posterior gut primordia. The cellular mechanisms underlying primordia internalization vary greatly among insects and recent work has suggested that Fog signaling is specific to the fast mode of gastrulation found in some flies. On the contrary, here we show in the beetle Tribolium, whose development is broadly representative for insects, that Fog has multiple morphogenetic functions. It modulates mesoderm internalization and controls a massive posterior infolding involved in gut and extraembryonic development. In addition, Fog signaling affects blastoderm cellularization, primordial germ cell positioning and cuboidal-to-squamous cell shape transitions in the extraembryonic serosa. Comparative analyses with two other distantly related insect species reveals that Fog's role during cellularisation is widely conserved and therefore might represent the ancestral function of the pathway.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files. The Supplemental Material File 1 contains all primers used to amplify sequences for production of antisense RNA (ISH) and dsRNA (RNAi).
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (CRC 680)
- Nadine Frey
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
- Kai H Conrads
University of Cologne (Postdoctoral grant)
- Matthias Pechmann
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (CRC 680)
- Siegfried Roth
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG Research Fellowship 407643416)
- Matthew Alan Benton
FAPERJ
- Rodrigo Nunes da Fonseca
University of Cologne (International Graduate School in Genetics and Functional Genomics)
- Rodrigo Nunes da Fonseca
- Cornelia von Levetzow
CNPq
- Rodrigo Nunes da Fonseca
CAPES
- Rodrigo Nunes da Fonseca
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (RU 1234)
- Muhammad Salim Hakeemi
Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds (PhD fellowship)
- Dominik Stappert
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Emmy Noether Program PA 2044/1-1))
- Kristen A Panfilio
National Institutes of Health (R03 HD078578)
- Jeremy A Lynch
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Postdoctoral Felloship)
- Matthew Alan Benton
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- K VijayRaghavan, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, India
Version history
- Received: April 2, 2019
- Accepted: September 30, 2019
- Accepted Manuscript published: October 1, 2019 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: October 15, 2019 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2019, Benton et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 1,999
- views
-
- 257
- downloads
-
- 24
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Evolutionary Biology
- Genetics and Genomics
Copy number variation in large gene families is well characterized for plant resistance genes, but similar studies are rare in animals. The zebrafish (Danio rerio) has hundreds of NLR immune genes, making this species ideal for studying this phenomenon. By sequencing 93 zebrafish from multiple wild and laboratory populations, we identified a total of 1513 NLRs, many more than the previously known 400. Approximately half of those are present in all wild populations, but only 4% were found in 80% or more of the individual fish. Wild fish have up to two times as many NLRs per individual and up to four times as many NLRs per population than laboratory strains. In contrast to the massive variability of gene copies, nucleotide diversity in zebrafish NLR genes is very low: around half of the copies are monomorphic and the remaining ones have very few polymorphisms, likely a signature of purifying selection.
-
- Ecology
- Evolutionary Biology
The long-trunked elephantids underwent a significant evolutionary stage characterized by an exceptionally elongated mandible. The initial elongation and subsequent regression of the long mandible, along with its co-evolution with the trunk, present an intriguing issue that remains incompletely understood. Through comparative functional and eco-morphological investigations, as well as feeding preference analysis, we reconstructed the feeding behavior of major groups of longirostrine elephantiforms. In the Platybelodon clade, the rapid evolutionary changes observed in the narial region, strongly correlated with mandible and tusk characteristics, suggest a crucial evolutionary transition where feeding function shifted from the mandible to the trunk, allowing proboscideans to expand their niches to more open regions. This functional shift further resulted in elephantids relying solely on their trunks for feeding. Our research provides insights into how unique environmental pressures shape the extreme evolution of organs, particularly in large mammals that developed various peculiar adaptations during the late Cenozoic global cooling trends.