Mechanism Of The Initial R8 Determining In Drosophila Eye Development

The Drosophila eye is a classic model with which to decode mechanisms of neural differentiation, cell fate determination, cell-cell communication. A drosophila compound eye is consist of 750-800 independent ommatidium require mechanisms that are precise controlled and finally present the highly reproducible hexagonal pattern. Position of each ommatidia is determined by a unique R8 photoreceptor. Various factors involved in this process, such as precise controled mechanism, interaction of related genes, morphogen dynamic, to restrict R8 precursor to a single cell from within a group of 15 cells expressing the proneural gene atonal(ato). Many model arisen to decode this process, but none of them can fully explain.Furthermore, all early studier in such area have been based on overexpression of the proteins involved. Thus, in vivo imaging of florescence-tagged endogenous products is needed to assess their real biological significance. To solve these problems, we built a serial of transgenic Drosophila lines with integrating a fluorescence-tagged with MHC RNA splice site in both sites donor DNA to target gene intron via genomic knock in and MIMIC recombination system. After co-locate within endogenous gene and fluorescence-tagged, we conclusion that our systems are well work.We also built a heat shock-recovery system by hybridize R8 sensor to temperature sensitive allele to observe the process after most pattern are disrupted. Toward this system, we found the single well-ordered R8 occurred in both Nts and D1ts alleles suggest disorders caused by N singling are recoverable. Furthermore, we built a recovery system including Notch, HH and Dpp signaling based on mosaic & clones via MARCM technology, in order to study on disruption in limited area.Therefore, our systems have great significance to the further studies on R8 determination in Drosophila eye, and can be well used to all studies on related researches.