Flexible manipulation of Omb levels in the endogenous expression region of Drosophila wing by combinational overexpression and suppression strategy

AbstractManipulating an exogenous or endogenous gene of interest at a defined level is critical for a wide variety of experiments. The Gal4/UAS system has been widely used to direct gene expression for studying complex genetic and biological problems inDrosophila melanogaster and other model organisms. Driven by a given tissue ‐specific Gal4, expressing UAS‐transgene or UAS‐RNAi (RNA interference) could be used to up‐ or down‐regulate target gene expression, respectively. However, the efficiency of the Gal4/UAS system is roughly predefined by properties of transposon vector constructs and the insertion site in t he transgenic stock. Here, we describe a simple way to modulateoptomotor blind (omb) expression levels in its endogenous expression region of the wing disc. We co ‐expressed UAS‐omb and UAS‐omb‐RNAi together under the control of dpp‐Gal4 driver which is expressed in theomb expression region of the wing pouch. The repression effect is more sensitive to temperature than that of overexpression. At low temperature, overexpression plays a dominant role but the efficiency is attenuated by UAS ‐omb‐RNAi. In contrast, at high temperature RNAi predominates in gene expression regulation. By this strategy, we could manipulateomb expression levels at a moderate level. It allows us to manipulateomb expression levels in the same tissue between overexpression and repression at different stages by temperature control.

Source: Insect Science - September 16, 2019 Category: Biology Authors: Xu ‐Bo Zhang, Wei Dong, Kai‐Xia Li, Juan‐Juan Wang, Jie Shen, Bernard Moussian, Jian‐Zhen Zhang Tags: ORIGINAL ARTICLE Source Type: research