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Motor Neuron Connections And Innervation Of Muscles In Drosophila Melanogaster, Sharon Tang

Student Theses and Dissertations

Drosophila melanogaster have two sets of muscle systems: larval muscles and adult muscles. The larval somatic muscle system is established during embryogenesis and is necessary for hatching, feeding, and crawling of the larvae. Like humans, Drosophila muscles have individual characteristics, like unique sizes, shapes, orientations, attachment sites, and innervation patterns by motor neurons. These properties are encoded by a group of transcriptional regulators that are expressed in specific muscle subsets. Currently, there are over twenty known transcription factors required for the development of the 30 distinct larval somatic muscles and specification of those muscle properties. We have examined how muscle-specific …