Drosophila WntD is a target and an inhibitor of the Dorsal/Twist/Snail network in the gastrulating embryo
Document Type
Journal ArticlePublication Date
2005-07-01Keywords
Amino Acid SequenceAnimals
Body Patterning
Drosophila Proteins
Drosophila melanogaster
Embryo, Nonmammalian
Gastrula
Intracellular Signaling Peptides and Proteins
Molecular Sequence Data
Morphogenesis
Nuclear Proteins
Phosphoproteins
Sequence Alignment
Sequence Homology, Amino Acid
Transcription Factors
Twist Transcription Factor
Zinc Fingers
Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology
Molecular Biology
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The maternal Toll signaling pathway sets up a nuclear gradient of the transcription factor Dorsal in the early Drosophila embryo. Dorsal activates twist and snail, and the Dorsal/Twist/Snail network activates and represses other zygotic genes to form the correct expression patterns along the dorsoventral axis. An essential function of this patterning is to promote ventral cell invagination during mesoderm formation, but how the downstream genes regulate ventral invagination is not known. We show here that wntD is a novel member of the Wnt family. The expression of wntD is activated by Dorsal and Twist, but the expression is much reduced in the ventral cells through repression by Snail. Overexpression of WntD in the early embryo inhibits ventral invagination, suggesting that the de-repressed WntD in snail mutant embryos may contribute to inhibiting ventral invagination. The overexpressed WntD inhibits invagination by antagonizing Dorsal nuclear localization, as well as twist and snail expression. Consistent with the early expression of WntD at the poles in wild-type embryos, loss of WntD leads to posterior expansion of nuclear Dorsal and snail expression, demonstrating that physiological levels of WntD can also attenuate Dorsal nuclear localization. We also show that the de-repressed WntD in snail mutant embryos contributes to the premature loss of snail expression, probably by inhibiting Dorsal. Thus, these results together demonstrate that WntD is regulated by the Dorsal/Twist/Snail network, and is an inhibitor of Dorsal nuclear localization and function.Source
Development. 2005 Aug;132(15):3419-29. Epub 2005 Jun 29. Link to article on publisher's siteDOI
10.1242/dev.01903Permanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/41955PubMed ID
15987775Related Resources
Link to Article in PubMedae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1242/dev.01903