Sex-specific splicing occurs genome-wide during early Drosophila embryogenesis
- Brown University, United States
- Johns Hopkins University, United States
Abstract
Sex-specific splicing is an essential process that regulates sex determination and drives sexual dimorphism. Yet, how early in development widespread sex-specific transcript diversity occurs was unknown because it had yet to be studied at the genome-wide level. We use the powerful Drosophila model to show that widespread sex-specific transcript diversity occurs early in development, concurrent with zygotic genome activation. We also present a new pipeline called time2splice to quantify changes in alternative splicing over time. Furthermore, we determine that one of the consequences of losing an essential maternally-deposited pioneer factor called CLAMP (Chromatin linked adapter for MSL proteins) is altered sex-specific splicing of genes involved in diverse biological processes that drive development. Overall, we show that sex-specific differences in transcript diversity exist even at the earliest stages of development.
Data availability
Sequencing data have been deposited in GEO under accession codes #GSE220455 and #GSE220439All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting file; Source Data files have been provided for Figures 2-figure Supplement 3, Figure 5, and Figure 6Source data used to generate all the figures, graphs, and Venn diagrams are provided in Supplementary Data Tables S1-S7
-
Identifying splicing targets of CLAMP by mRNA-sequencingNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE220439.
-
Histone locus regulation by the Drosophila dosage compensation adaptor protein CLAMPNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE102922.
-
Targeting of the dosage-compensated male X-chromosome during early Drosophila developmentNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE133637.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R35GM126994)
- Mukulika Ray
- Erica Larschan
National Science Foundation (Graduate Research Fellowship)
- Ashley Mae Conard
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2023, Ray 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
-
- 1,898
- views
-
- 237
- downloads
-
- 9
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
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)
Sex-specific splicing occurs genome-wide during early Drosophila embryogenesis
eLife 12:e87865.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.87865
