The dynamic transmission of positional information in stau-mutants during Drosophila embryogenesis
Abstract
It has been suggested that Staufen (Stau) is key in controlling the variability of the posterior boundary of the Hb anterior domain (xHb). However, its underlying mechanism is elusive. Here, we quantified the dynamic 3D expression of segmentation genes in Drosophila embryos. With improved control of measurement errors, we show xHb of stau- mutants reproducibly moves posteriorly by 10% of the embryo length (EL) to the wild type (WT) position in the nuclear cycle (nc) 14, and its variability at short time windows is comparable as that of the WT. Moreover, for stau- mutants, the upstream Bicoid (Bcd) gradients show equivalent relative intensity noise to that of the WT in nc12-nc14, and the downstream Even-skipped (Eve) and cephalic furrow (CF) show the same positional errors as the WT. Our results indicate that threshold-dependent activation and self-organized filtering are not mutually exclusive but could both be implemented in early Drosophila embryogenesis.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Natural Science Foundation of China (The General Program 31670852)
- Feng Liu
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Sandeep Krishna, National Centre for Biological Sciences‐Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, India
Version history
- Received: December 9, 2019
- Accepted: June 6, 2020
- Accepted Manuscript published: June 8, 2020 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: July 2, 2020 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2020, Yang 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.
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