A concave microwell array fabricated using the ommatidium of the common fruit fly for efficient cell culture

RSC Advances ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (69) ◽  
pp. 64266-64270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bhupendra Shravage ◽  
Shefali Ramteke ◽  
Prasad Kulkarni ◽  
Dhananjay Bodas

Top left: SEM of compound eye of Drosophila melanogaster replica in PDMS. Bottom left: SEM of MCF-7 cell grown in the micro well. Bottom right: confocal of the MCF-7 cells grown for 72 h.

2009 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 772-776 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Mowat ◽  
Regine Gries ◽  
Grigori Khaskin ◽  
Gerhard Gries ◽  
Robert Britton

PLoS Genetics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (7) ◽  
pp. e1009460
Author(s):  
Abhishek Kumar Mishra ◽  
Cornelia Fritsch ◽  
Roumen Voutev ◽  
Richard S. Mann ◽  
Simon G. Sprecher

Visual perception of the environment is mediated by specialized photoreceptor (PR) neurons of the eye. Each PR expresses photosensitive opsins, which are activated by a particular wavelength of light. In most insects, the visual system comprises a pair of compound eyes that are mainly associated with motion, color or polarized light detection, and a triplet of ocelli that are thought to be critical during flight to detect horizon and movements. It is widely believed that the evolutionary diversification of compound eye and ocelli in insects occurred from an ancestral visual organ around 500 million years ago. Concurrently, opsin genes were also duplicated to provide distinct spectral sensitivities to different PRs of compound eye and ocelli. In the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, Rhodopsin1 (Rh1) and Rh2 are closely related opsins that originated from the duplication of a single ancestral gene. However, in the visual organs, Rh2 is uniquely expressed in ocelli whereas Rh1 is uniquely expressed in outer PRs of the compound eye. It is currently unknown how this differential expression of Rh1 and Rh2 in the two visual organs is controlled to provide unique spectral sensitivities to ocelli and compound eyes. Here, we show that Homothorax (Hth) is expressed in ocelli and confers proper rhodopsin expression. We find that Hth controls a binary Rhodopsin switch in ocelli to promote Rh2 expression and repress Rh1 expression. Genetic and molecular analysis of rh1 and rh2 supports that Hth acts through their promoters to regulate Rhodopsin expression in the ocelli. Finally, we also show that when ectopically expressed in the retina, hth is sufficient to induce Rh2 expression only at the outer PRs in a cell autonomous manner. We therefore propose that the diversification of rhodpsins in the ocelli and retinal outer PRs occurred by duplication of an ancestral gene, which is under the control of Homothorax.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 182-185
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Popis ◽  
Blanka Borowiec ◽  
Maurycy Jankowski

AbstractThe common fruit fly, or Drosophila Melanogaster, has been used as an object of biomedicals studies for over a century. It has been mostly employed in genetic research, as it exhibits several advantages which make its use relatively easy and cheap, with the results widely translatable into further vertebrate studies. This model been the basis of the work of Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, who together with Eric Wieschaus unravelled much of the mystery surrounding early drosophila development in the 1970s-1980s, laying foundations for broader understanding of multicellular organism embryogenesis, which brought them a Nobel prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1995. The knowledge gained from drosophila studies improves the basic understanding of developmental processes, while the model itself is relatively easy to maintain, analyse and translate the results onto other species. While models such as Zebrafish present better with other vertebrates, drosophila remains a very important element of genetic research, finding even more applications with the development of current science and medicine. Hence, in this short review, the outline of the history, breakthroughs and perspectives of the drosophila research has been presented.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Paul ◽  
Guillaume Giraud ◽  
Katrin Domsch ◽  
Marilyne Duffraisse ◽  
Frédéric Marmigère ◽  
...  

AbstractFlying insects have invaded all the aerial space on Earth and this astonishing radiation could not have been possible without a remarkable morphological diversification of their flight appendages. Here, we show that characteristic spatial expression profiles and levels of the Hox genes Antennapedia (Antp) and Ultrabithorax (Ubx) underlie the formation of two different flight organs in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. We further demonstrate that flight appendage morphology is dependent on specific Hox doses. Interestingly, we find that wing morphology from evolutionary distant four-winged insect species is also associated with a differential expression of Antp and Ubx. We propose that variation in the spatial expression profile and dosage of Hox proteins is a major determinant of flight appendage diversification in Drosophila and possibly in other insect species during evolution.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaochan Xu ◽  
Wei Yang ◽  
Binghui Tian ◽  
Xiuwen Sui ◽  
Weilai Chi ◽  
...  

AbstractThe fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, has been used as a model organism for the molecular and genetic dissection of sleeping behaviors. However, most previous studies were based on qualitative or semi-quantitative characterizations. Here we quantified sleep in flies. We set up an assay to continuously track the activity of flies using infrared camera, which monitored the movement of tens of flies simultaneously with high spatial and temporal resolution. We obtained accurate statistics regarding the rest and sleep patterns of single flies. Analysis of our data has revealed a general pattern of rest and sleep: the rest statistics obeyed a power law distribution and the sleep statistics obeyed an exponential distribution. Thus, a resting fly would start to move again with a probability that decreased with the time it has rested, whereas a sleeping fly would wake up with a probability independent of how long it had slept. Resting transits to sleeping at time scales of minutes. Our method allows quantitative investigations of resting and sleeping behaviors and our results provide insights for mechanisms of falling into and waking up from sleep.


Genetics ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 144 (4) ◽  
pp. 1565-1575 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esteban Hasson ◽  
Walter F Eanes

In the present report, we studied nucleotide variation in three gene regions of Drosophila melanogaster, spanning >5 kb and showing different degrees of association with the cosmopolitan inversion In(3-L)Payne. The analysis of sequence variation in the regions surrounding the breakpoints and the heat shock 83 (Hsp83) gene locus, located close to the distal breakpoint, revealed the absence of shared polymorphisms and the presence of a number of fixed differences between arrangements, indicating absence of genetic exchange. In contrast, for the esterase-6 gene region, located in the center of the inversion, we observed the presence of shared polymorphisms between arrangements suggesting genetic exchange. In the regions close to the breakpoints, the common St arrangement is 10 times more polymorphic than inverted chromosomes. We propose that the lack of recombination between arrangements in these regions coupled with genetic hitchhiking is the best explanation for the low heterozygosity observed in inverted lines. Using the data for the breakpoints, we estimate that this inversion polymorphism is around 0.36 million yr old. Although it is widely accepted that inversions are examples of balanced polymorphisms, none of the current neutrality tests including our Monte Carlo simulations showed significant departure from neutral expectations.


1999 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 1159-1170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeline A. Crosby ◽  
Chaya Miller ◽  
, Tamar Alon ◽  
Kellie L. Watson ◽  
C. Peter Verrijzer ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT The genes of the trithorax group (trxG) inDrosophila melanogaster are required to maintain the pattern of homeotic gene expression that is established early in embryogenesis by the transient expression of the segmentation genes. The precise role of each of the diverse trxG members and the functional relationships among them are not well understood. Here, we report on the isolation of the trxG gene moira(mor) and its molecular characterization. morencodes a fruit fly homolog of the human and yeast chromatin-remodeling factors BAF170, BAF155, and SWI3. mor is widely expressed throughout development, and its 170-kDa protein product is present in many embryonic tissues. In vitro, MOR can bind to itself and it interacts with Brahma (BRM), an SWI2-SNF2 homolog, with which it is associated in embryonic nuclear extracts. The leucine zipper motif of MOR is likely to participate in self-oligomerization; the equally conserved SANT domain, for which no function is known, may be required for optimal binding to BRM. MOR thus joins BRM and Snf5-related 1 (SNR1), two known Drosophila SWI-SNF subunits that act as positive regulators of the homeotic genes. These observations provide a molecular explanation for the phenotypic and genetic relationships among several of the trxG genes by suggesting that they encode evolutionarily conserved components of a chromatin-remodeling complex.


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