DER signaling restricts the boundaries of the wing field during Drosophila development

DER signaling restricts the boundaries of the wing field during Drosophila development

^*Centro de Biología Molecular “Severo Ochoa,” Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Cantoblanco, Madrid 28049, Spain; and ^‡University Museum of Zoology, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EJ, United Kingdom

Communicated by A. Garcia-Bellido, Autonomous University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain (received for review March 20, 2000)

Abstract

Arthropod and vertebrate limbs develop from secondary embryonic fields. In insects, the wing imaginal disk is subdivided early in development into the wing and notum subfields. The activity of the Wingless protein is fundamental for this subdivision and seems to be the first element of the hierarchy of regulatory genes promoting wing formation. Drosophila epidermal growth factor receptor (DER) signaling has many functions in fly development. Here we show that antagonizing DER signaling during the second larval instar leads to notum to wing transformations and wing mirror-image duplications. DER signaling is necessary for confining the wing subregion in the developing wing disk and for the specification of posterior identity. To do so, DER signaling acts by restricting the expression of Wingless to the dorsal-posterior quadrant of wing discs, suppressing wing-organizing activities, and by cooperating in the maintenance of Engrailed expression in posterior compartment cells.

Footnotes

↵ † Present address: Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Medical Research Council, Cambridge, United Kingdom CB2 2QH.
↵ § To whom reprint requests should be addressed. E-mail: emblanco{at}cbm.uam.es.
Abbreviations:

A/P,

anterior and posterior;

D/V,

dorsal and ventral;

DER,

Drosophila epidermal growth factor receptor;

vn,

vein;

wg,

wingless;

en,

engrailed;

cnk,

connector enhancer of ksr;

dpp,

decapentaplegic;

vg,

vestigial;

ci,

cubitus interruptus;

MAPK,

mitogen-activated protein kinase;

DN,

dominant-negative;

ap,

apterous