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
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Identifying splicing targets of CLAMP by mRNA-sequencingNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE220439.
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Histone locus regulation by the Drosophila dosage compensation adaptor protein CLAMPNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE102922.
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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.
Reviewing Editor
- Luisa Cochella, Johns Hopkins University, United States
Version history
- Preprint posted: March 19, 2021 (view preprint)
- Received: March 17, 2023
- Accepted: July 11, 2023
- Accepted Manuscript published: July 19, 2023 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: August 3, 2023 (version 2)
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.
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Sex-specific splicing occurs genome-wide during early Drosophila embryogenesis
eLife 12:e87865.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.87865
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