El reclutamiento le da forma al patrón de Vestigial y contribuye al crecimiento del ala de Drosophila

Expositor:  Luis Muñoz Nava – Departamento de Fisiología del CINVESTAV (México)

Fecha: Martes 14/11/2017 – 10.30 hs.      ¡¡NUEVO HORARIO!!

How patterns that determine cell fates get established is a fundamental problem in developmental biology. In the developing wing of Drosophila melanogaster, the wing fate is defined by the expression of the selector gene vestigial (vg). The size of the Vg domain is determined by two mechanisms. First, through the proliferation of vg-expressing cells near the dorsal-ventral boundary of the wing disc, and second, the propagation of the Vg pattern to neighboring cells in a process known as recruitment. Although the molecular factors that determine the progression of recruitment have been previously documented, little is known about the spatio-temporal propagation and contributions of these mechanisms to the final size of the wing. We quantitatively measured the spatial pattern of Vg at different times during wing disc development and show that the width of the Vg gradient increases more than what would be expected from scaling by homogeneous tissue growth. Interestingly, the Vg pattern also changes in shape and do this in a very specific window of time, suggesting that the contribution of the recruitment process to the Vg pattern is spatially and temporally controlled. Recruitment-mutant wings are proportionally smaller compared to control wings, suggesting that recruitment contributes to wing size.