In insects, control of body size is intimately linked to nutritional quality as well as environmental and genetic cues that regulate the timing of developmental transitions. Prothoracicotropic hormone (PTTH) has been proposed to play an essential role in regulating the production and/or release of ecdysone, a steroid hormone that stimulates molting and metamorphosis. In this report, we examine the consequences on Drosophila development of ablating the PTTH-producing neurons. Surprisingly, PTTH production is not essential for molting or metamorphosis. Instead, loss of PTTH results in delayed larval development and eclosion of larger flies with more cells. Prolonged feeding, without changing the rate of growth, causes the overgrowth and is a consequence of low ecdysteroid titers. These results indicate that final body size in insects is determined by a balance between growth-rate regulators such as insulin and developmental timing cues such as PTTH that set the duration of the feeding interval.

Molting is elicited by a critical titer of ecdysteroids that includes the principal molting hormone, 20-hydroxyecdysone (20E), and ecdysone (E), which is the precursor of 20E but also has morphogenetic roles of its own. The prothoracic glands are the predominate source of ecdysteroids, and the rate of synthesis of these polyhydroxylated sterols is critical for molting and metamorphosis. This review concerns three aspects of ecdysteroidogenesis: (a) how the brain neuropeptide prothoracicotropic hormone (PTTH) initiates a transductory cascade in cells of the prothoracic gland, which results in an increased rate of ecdysteroid biosynthesis (upregulation); (b) how the concentrations of 20E in the hemolymph feed back on the prothoracic gland to decrease rates of ecdysteroidogenesis (downregulation); and (c) how the prothoracic gland cells convert cholesterol to the precursor of E and then 20E, a series of reactions only now being understood because of the use of a combination of classical biochemistry and molecular genetics.

Ecdysteroids regulate many key developmental events in arthropods including molting and metamorphosis. Recently, members of the Drosophila Halloween group of genes, that are required for embryonic viability and cuticle deposition, have been shown to code for several cytochrome P450 enzymes that catalyze the terminal hydroxylation steps in the conversion of cholesterol to the molting hormone 20-hydroxyecdysone. These P450s are conserved in other insects and each is thought to function throughout development as the sole mediator of a particular biosynthetic step since, where analyzed, each is expressed at all stages of development and shows no closely related homolog in their respective genomes. In contrast, we show here that several dipteran genomes encode two novel, highly related, microsomal P450 enzymes, Cyp307A1 and Cyp307A2, that likely participate as stage-specific components of the ecdysone biosynthetic machinery. This hypothesis comes from the observation that Cyp307A1 is encoded by the Halloween gene spook (spo), but unlike other Halloween class genes, Dmspo is not expressed during the larval stages. In contrast, Cyp307a2, dubbed spookier (spok), is expressed primarily during larval stages within the prothoracic gland cells of the ring gland. RNAi mediated reduction in the expression of this heterochromatin localized gene leads to arrest at the first instar stage which can be rescued by feeding the larva 20E, E or ketodiol but not 7dC. In addition, spok expression is eliminated in larvae carrying mutations in molting defective (mld), a gene encoding a nuclear zinc finger protein that is required for production of ecdysone during Drosophila larval development. Intriguingly, mld is not present in the Bombyx mori genome, and we have identified only one spook homolog in both Bombyx and Manduca that is expressed in both embryos and larva. These studies suggest an evolutionary split between Diptera and Lepidoptera in how the ecdysone biosynthetic pathway is regulated during development.

Holometabolous insects undergo complete metamorphosis to become sexually mature adults. Metamorphosis is initiated by brain-derived prothoracicotropic hormone (PTTH), which stimulates the production of the molting hormone ecdysone via an incompletely defined signaling pathway. Here we demonstrate that Torso, a receptor tyrosine kinase that regulates embryonic terminal cell fate in Drosophila, is the PTTH receptor. Trunk, the embryonic Torso ligand, is related to PTTH, and ectopic expression of PTTH in the embryo partially rescues trunk mutants. In larvae, torso is expressed specifically in the prothoracic gland (PG), and its loss phenocopies the removal of PTTH. The activation of Torso by PTTH stimulates extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) phosphorylation, and the loss of ERK in the PG phenocopies the loss of PTTH and Torso. We conclude that PTTH initiates metamorphosis by activation of the Torso/ERK pathway.

The steroid 20-hydroxyecdysone (20E) is the primary regulatory hormone that mediates developmental transitions in insects and other arthropods. 20E is produced from ecdysone (E) by the action of a P450 monooxygenase that hydroxylates E at carbon 20. The gene coding for this key enzyme of ecdysteroidogenesis has not been identified definitively in any insect. We show here that the Drosophila E-20-monooxygenase (E20MO) is the product of the shade (shd) locus (cytochrome p450, CYP314a1). When shd is transfected into Drosophila S2 cells, extensive conversion of E to 20E is observed, whereas in sorted homozygous shd embryos, no E20MO activity is apparent either in vivo or in vitro. Mutations in shd lead to severe disruptions in late embryonic morphogenesis and exhibit phenotypes identical to those seen in disembodied (dib) and shadow (sad) mutants, two other genes of the Halloween class that code for P450 enzymes that catalyze the final two steps in the synthesis of E from 2,22-dideoxyecdysone. Unlike dib and sad, shd is not expressed in the ring gland but is expressed in peripheral tissues such as the epidermis, midgut, Malpighian tubules, and fat body, i.e., tissues known to be major sites of E20MO activity in a variety of insects. However, the tissue in which shd is expressed does not appear to be important for developmental function because misexpression of shd in the embryonic mesoderm instead of the epidermis, the normal embryonic tissue in which shd is expressed, rescues embryonic lethality.

The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster displays an ovarian diapause that is regulated by photoperiod.Newly eclosed female flies (Canton-S wild type) exposed to short days (<14 hr of light per day) at 12'C (or 100C) enter a fairly shallow reproductive diapause. Females exposed to long days (16 hr of light per day) at the same low temperature undergo ovarian maturation. The short day induced diapause continues for 6-7 weeks under a 10:14 light/dark cycle at 120C but is terminated rapidly after a transfer to higher temperature (18 or 250C) or to long days (18:6 light/dark cycle).Females from three strains homozygous for alleles of the period (per) locus, reportedly arrhythmic for behavioral circadian rhythms, and females that possessed two overlapping deletions of per were also capable of discriminating between long and short days, although, when compared with the wild-type flies, the critical day length was shifted to shorter values by -2 hr. It is concluded that the period locus is not causally involved in photoperiod time measurement.The majority of insects inhabiting the temperate zones develop and reproduce during the summer months but become dormant as winter approaches. Although ecological distinctions are becoming blurred, this dormancy may be a direct response to unfavorable conditions (i.e., cold torpor or quiescence), or it involves programmed responses to seasonal changes in day length (or photoperiod), which results in interruptions or alterations in endocrine regulation (i.e., diapause). Photoperiodic regulation of diapause has been documented for a large number of species representing -13 insect orders (1).A central problem in the study of photoperiodism is the nature of the "clock" used by organisms to discriminate long days from short days (or short nights from long nights) as the seasons change. The mechanism of this time measurement remains obscure, but a favored model suggests that night length is measured by a clock based on the system of circadian oscillations, which also regulate overt daily rhythms (2-4). In the 50 years since its formulation, this proposition has become known as "Hunning's hypothesis." D. melanogaster occupies an almost unique position in biological research because of its amenability for molecular and genetic analysis. Therefore, the nature of its overwintering strategy, whether diapause or quiescence, is also of considerable interest. To our knowledge, no published observations on this aspect of its biology have appeared, although it would be surprising if some attention had not been given to the problem, especially since the circadian system is known to underlie photoperiodic time meaurement [at least in D. auraria (13)], and the clock or period (per) locus is being subjected to intensive molecular and genetic analysis (14-17).This paper describes experiments with D. melanogaster in which newly eclosed adults were exposed to a range of photoperiods at temperatures somewhat lower than those normally used in routine laboratory maintenance and experimentation in an a...

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