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Developmental biology

Pulling the fly's leg

Nature volume 392, pages 657–658 (1998)Cite this article

First a look back at the Antp story. The antenna-to-leg transformation of the dominant Antp mutants had been known for a long time, but, in 1981, Struhl2 provided the critical results for a model of Antp function. By making revertants of a dominant AntpNs allele, he isolated recessive mutations that lacked Antp activity. In adult flies, these mutations produced a transformation of the second leg into an antenna — just the reverse of that seen in the dominant mutations — with no effect on the normal antennae. He concluded that Antp promotes development of the mesothoracic (second) leg, as opposed to antennal development, and suggested that Antp does this by suppressing a hypothetical ‘antennal-determining’ gene (or genes) that normally operates in the antenna but not in the leg.

In the absence of the two other Hox genes that are involved in leg patterning (Sex comb reduced, Scr, and Ultrabithorax, Ubx), Antp prevents antennal development in all three types of leg3. Struhl proposed that the phenotype of the dominant Antp mutations would result from inappropriate activity of the Antp product in the antenna, leading to repression of the antennal-determining genes. This was supported by data, mainly from Walter Gehring's laboratory, showing that the antenna-to-leg transformations are associated with the presence of the Antp protein in the antennae4,5.

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Figure 1: Head and thorax of a wild-type fly (left) and a dominant Antennapedia mutant (right).
Figure 2: Interactions between Antennapedia (Antp), homothorax (hth) and extradenticle (exd) that determine the development of the antennal and leg primordia.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. the Centro de Biologia Molecular, CSIC-UAM Universidad Autnoma de Madrid, 28049, Madrid, Spain

    Ginés Morata & Ernesto Sánchez-Herrero

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  1. Ginés Morata
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  2. Ernesto Sánchez-Herrero
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Morata, G., Sánchez-Herrero, E. Pulling the fly's leg. Nature 392, 657–658 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/33547

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