Abstract
The first hint of segmentation in the Drosophila embryo is the appearance of shallow transverse grooves that divide the main part of the germ band into 14 uniform domains1. These grooves are conspicuous in the 5–7-h-old embryo when viewed in the scanning electron microscope2 and can also be seen in longitudinal sections. Since their discovery in 1950, the domains delineated by the grooves haye been thought to be segments1,2, but now several lines of evidence suggest that they are ‘parasegments’—units consisting of a posterior compartment3 of one segment and an anterior compartment of the next4,5. If this is the case, the posterior compartments would lie in the anterior parts, of the domains delineated by the grooves. By using the engrailed gene product as a marker, we have now mapped the posterior compartments and report here that they are indeed located in the anterior quarter of the domains and that their anterior borders coincide with the grooves, establishing that the domains are parasegments.
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Ingham, P., Martinez-Arias, A., Lawrence, P. et al. Expression of engrailed in the parasegment of Drosophila. Nature 317, 634–636 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1038/317634a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/317634a0
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