Orthopedia expression during Drosophila melanogaster nervous system development and its regulation by microRNA-252

Generation of Mutants from the 57B Region of Drosophila melanogaster

“…Another advantage is the integration of an attP site in the locus instead of the deleted sequence, which could be used afterward to reintegrate various DNA sequences like a Gal4 sequence or a reporter gene with the help of specific reintegration vectors [73]. In our hands, this worked pretty well and we generated new mutant alleles for the genes otp, DRx, hbn, and earmuff (erm) [74] and reintegrated Gal4 into the locus to make Gal4 strains of the corresponding genes [44][45][46]75]. Our targeting efficiencies were in the same range as those reported by [73] between 1/1000 and 1/2000.…”

“…Summarized our previous work, we isolated three homeobox genes from the 57B region, the gene orthopedia (otp) [38,39], Drosophila Retinal homeobox (DRx) [40,41], and homeobrain (hbn) [42,43]. All genes are located in a 77 kb interval and build a cluster of homeobox genes showing very interesting expression patterns during development mainly in the nervous system [43][44][45][46]. To analyse the function of these genes we isolated mutants from the 57B region performing a classical EMS mutagenesis experiment using a deficiency uncovering the 57B region and succeeded in the isolation of lethal mutant alleles for all three genes [39,43,47].…”