Shaping the scaling characteristics of gap gene expression patterns in Drosophila

Ruoqing Xu; Fei Dai; Honggang Wu; Renjie Jiao; Feng He; Jun Ma

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e13623

Shaping the scaling characteristics of gap gene expression patterns in Drosophila

Heliyon. 2023 Feb 10;9(2):e13623. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e13623. eCollection 2023 Feb.

Authors

Ruoqing Xu^{1

2}, Fei Dai³, Honggang Wu^{4

5}, Renjie Jiao^{4

5}, Feng He^{1

2}, Jun Ma^{1

2

6}

Affiliations

¹ Women's Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310058, China.
² Institute of Genetics, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310058, China.
³ Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.
⁴ Sino-French Hoffmann Institute, School of Basic Medical Science, Guangzhou Medical University, Guangzhou 510182, China.
⁵ Key Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.
⁶ Joint Institute of Genetics and Genome Medicine between Zhejiang University and University of Toronto, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.

Abstract

How patterns are formed to scale with tissue size remains an unresolved problem. Here we investigate embryonic patterns of gap gene expression along the anterior-posterior (AP) axis in Drosophila. We use embryos that greatly differ in length and, importantly, possess distinct length-scaling characteristics of the Bicoid (Bcd) gradient. We systematically analyze the dynamic movements of gap gene expression boundaries in relation to both embryo length and Bcd input as a function of time. We document the process through which such dynamic movements drive both an emergence of a global scaling landscape and evolution of boundary-specific scaling characteristics. We show that, despite initial differences in pattern scaling characteristics that mimic those of Bcd in the anterior, such characteristics of final patterns converge. Our study thus partitions the contributions of Bcd input and regulatory dynamics inherent to the AP patterning network in shaping embryonic pattern's scaling characteristics.

Keywords: Bicoid; Drosophila; Gap genes; Morphogen gradient; Pattern formation.