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2022

Drosophila

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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Regulation Of Tissue Mechanics And Adherens Junctions By Small Gtpase Rhoa During Drosophila Embryogenesis, Hanqing Guo Nov 2022

Regulation Of Tissue Mechanics And Adherens Junctions By Small Gtpase Rhoa During Drosophila Embryogenesis, Hanqing Guo

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Actomyosin contractility plays an important role at both the cell and tissue level during developments. In this study, we developed an optogenetic tool that can acutely inhibit actomyosin contractility by targeting its main activator Rho1. This optogenetic tool can achieve myosin inhibition within one minute and thus enable further dissection of actomyosin function in development. In my first two projects, I used Drosophila mesoderm invagination (also known as ventral furrow formation) as a model to study epithelial folding, a fundamental mechanism for constructing complex 3D tissues. Apical constriction mediated by actomyosin contractility is a common mechanism for epithelial folding. However, …


Drosophila Melanogaster As A Model For Male Reproductive System Ethanol Toxicity, Gbemisola Ilelaboye Sep 2022

Drosophila Melanogaster As A Model For Male Reproductive System Ethanol Toxicity, Gbemisola Ilelaboye

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Drosophila melanogaster has been extensively used in different types of research as a model organism due to its high reproductivity, short life span, and easy maintenance. In this paper, we examined drosophila as a model for ethanol toxicity in the male reproductive system. We developed three assays: The DAPI assay, sperm viability assay, and tubulin staining assay. The DAPI assay is a nuclear staining assay that assesses the effects of various ethanol concentrations in late spermiogenesis in which increased detrimental effects to the sperm bundles were observed. The second assay consisted of the sperm viability assay which showed an increase …


Genetic Determinants Of Primary Nociceptor Sensitivity In Drosophila Melanogaster, Christine Hale Aug 2022

Genetic Determinants Of Primary Nociceptor Sensitivity In Drosophila Melanogaster, Christine Hale

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abnormal pain affects ~50 million adults nationwide. With many of the current treatment options for chronic pain, such as opioid analgesics, carrying side effects such as the threat for addiction, research into safer and more effective options for chronic pain relief is crucial. Abnormal alterations in nociceptive sensitivity, which is the sensitivity of peripheral sensory neurons that detect noxious stimuli, can underlie, and perpetuate chronic pain. However, much is still unknown about the mechanism of how these abnormal alterations in sensitivity occur. To help elucidate genetic components controlling nociceptive sensitivity, the Drosophila melanogaster larval nociception model has been used …


A Tale Of Two Genomes: The Complex Interplay Between The Mitochondrial And The Nuclear Genomes, Abhilesh S. Dhawanjewar Jul 2022

A Tale Of Two Genomes: The Complex Interplay Between The Mitochondrial And The Nuclear Genomes, Abhilesh S. Dhawanjewar

School of Biological Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Mitochondria, the product of an ancient endosymbiotic event are pivotal to eukaryotic cells by synthesizing the majority of the cell’s ATP output. However, modern- day mitochondria are completely dependent on more than one thousand nuclear-encoded products for their function and the maintenance of their genomes. The fundamentally different ways in which the mitochondrial (mtDNA) and the nuclear (nucDNA) genomes are replicated and inherited lead to captivating coevolutionary dynamics between them. The aims of this dissertation are to investigate the coevolutionary dynamics between the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes at three distinct biological scales. At the organismal level, we use a Drosophila …


Interchromosomal Interaction Of Homologous Stat92e Alleles Regulates Transcriptional Switch During Stem-Cell Differentiation., Matthew Antel, Romir Raj, Madona Y G Masoud, Ziwei Pan, Sheng Li, Barbara G Mellone, Mayu Inaba Jul 2022

Interchromosomal Interaction Of Homologous Stat92e Alleles Regulates Transcriptional Switch During Stem-Cell Differentiation., Matthew Antel, Romir Raj, Madona Y G Masoud, Ziwei Pan, Sheng Li, Barbara G Mellone, Mayu Inaba

Faculty Research 2022

Pairing of homologous chromosomes in somatic cells provides the opportunity of interchromosomal interaction between homologous gene regions. In the Drosophila male germline, the Stat92E gene is highly expressed in a germline stem cell (GSC) and gradually downregulated during the differentiation. Here we show that the pairing of Stat92E is always tight in GSCs and immediately loosened in differentiating daughter cells, gonialblasts (GBs). Disturbance of Stat92E pairing by relocation of one locus to another chromosome or by knockdown of global pairing/anti-pairing factors both result in a failure of Stat92E downregulation, suggesting that the pairing is required for the decline in transcription. …


Cas9/Nickase-Induced Allelic Conversion By Homologous Chromosome-Templated Repair In, Sitara Roy, Sara Sanz Juste, Marketta Sneider, Ankush Auradkar, Carissa Klanseck, Zhiqian Li, Alison Henrique Ferreira Julio, Victor Lopez Del Amo, Ethan Bier, Annabel Guichard Jul 2022

Cas9/Nickase-Induced Allelic Conversion By Homologous Chromosome-Templated Repair In, Sitara Roy, Sara Sanz Juste, Marketta Sneider, Ankush Auradkar, Carissa Klanseck, Zhiqian Li, Alison Henrique Ferreira Julio, Victor Lopez Del Amo, Ethan Bier, Annabel Guichard

Journal Articles

Repair of double-strand breaks (DSBs) in somatic cells is primarily accomplished by error-prone nonhomologous end joining and less frequently by precise homology-directed repair preferentially using the sister chromatid as a template. Here, a


Measuring Mtdna In Drosophila, Lola Demurger Jul 2022

Measuring Mtdna In Drosophila, Lola Demurger

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Mitochondria have long been studied in relation to aging as they are critical to cell operation, and their dysfunction is linked to several age-related factors, such as shortened lifespan and increased innate immunity. In this study, we use a mitochondrially targeted nuclease called UL12.5 to artificially induce mitochondrial dysfunction by degrading the mitochondrial genome in Drosophila. Degraded mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has many downstream effects, including mtDNA depletion, mtDNA leakage into the cytoplasm, chronically upregulated innate immune response, and shortened lifespan. We began the process of developing an assay that measured mtDNA depletion as a result of UL12.5-mediated mtDNA degradation in …


Genetic Circadian Mosaics And The Clock Network’S Contributions To Sleep, Lukasz Widziszewski Jun 2022

Genetic Circadian Mosaics And The Clock Network’S Contributions To Sleep, Lukasz Widziszewski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Circadian rhythms are physiological and behavioral changes which follow a 24-hour cycle. Drosophila Melanogaster’s circadian clock neuronal network (CCNN) has been identified and several subpopulations have been characterized based on previous studies; the classifications of subpopulations of neurons within the CCNN are based on a return of anticipatory locomotor activity preceding the two daily light transitions (Lights on = dawn/Lights off = dusk). The neurons responsible for the return of anticipatory morning locomotor activity have been referred to as the M-cells, the group of neurons known to rescue evening anticipatory locomotor activity have been termed the E-cells. In this …


A Nickase Cas9 Gene-Drive System Promotes Super-Mendelian Inheritance In Drosophila, Víctor López Del Amo, Sara Sanz Juste, Valentino M Gantz May 2022

A Nickase Cas9 Gene-Drive System Promotes Super-Mendelian Inheritance In Drosophila, Víctor López Del Amo, Sara Sanz Juste, Valentino M Gantz

Journal Articles

CRISPR-based gene-drives have been proposed for managing insect populations, including disease-transmitting mosquitoes, due to their ability to bias their inheritance toward super-Mendelian rates (>50%). Current technologies use a Cas9 that introduces DNA double-strand breaks into the opposing wild-type allele to replace it with a copy of the gene-drive allele via DNA homology-directed repair. However, the use of different Cas9 versions is unexplored, and alternative approaches could increase the available toolkit for gene-drive designs. Here, we report a gene-drive that relies on Cas9 nickases that generate staggered paired nicks in DNA to propagate the engineered gene-drive cassette. We show that …


Developing A Novel Place Preference Assay To Compare Drosophila Species Over Time, Martha M. Brinson May 2022

Developing A Novel Place Preference Assay To Compare Drosophila Species Over Time, Martha M. Brinson

Honors Theses

Across phylogeny, integration of external factors, memory, and internal states of the organism dictate organismal behavior and mechanisms. The underlying genetic components can affect these behaviors such as in genomic changes arising from speciation. In this thesis, a new place preference assay was evaluated in the analysis and investigation of two species of Drosophila flies (D. melanogaster and D. simulans) to measure similarities and differences and their attraction to two different food substrates. Sleep and circadian measurements were also recorded during experimentation. The Drosophila Activity Monitor 5M (DAM5M) System and Sleep Circadian Analysis MATLAB Program (SCAMP) analysis were …


Headcase Regulates Growth In Response To Nutritional Status Downstream Of Insulin Signaling, Thomas George May 2022

Headcase Regulates Growth In Response To Nutritional Status Downstream Of Insulin Signaling, Thomas George

Honors Scholar Theses

Cancer cells are notorious for growing in an unrestricted manner without regard for environmental cues. Recently, Li et al. (2019) discovered headcase (hdc) functions by binding to the mTORC1 complex in the mTOR signaling pathway and preventing further signaling. Interestingly, under nutrient restricted (NR) conditions, cells with mutated hdc proteins proliferated more than cells with normal functioning hdc. It is well known that insulin signaling is downregulated under NR conditions, so a potential signaling pathway with insulin, PI3K, PDK1, Akt, PTEN, and hdc was created as a way to explain the link between hdc function and nutritional status. A Drosophila …


Translation Control Tunes Drosophila Oogenesis, Elliot T. Martin May 2022

Translation Control Tunes Drosophila Oogenesis, Elliot T. Martin

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The decision of a stem cell to either self-renew or differentiate is controlled by specific cellularpathways that can act at the level of transcription, translation, or post-translation. To study the regulation of these pathways in-vivo, I have used the female Drosophila germline as a model system. Each of the steps from germline stem cell (GSC) to egg require changes in cellular pathways. These changes can occur at the level of transcription, post-transciption, translation, or post-translation . Decades of research has elucidated many of the changes to gene that occur during oogenesis, however, many players in this process still remain mysterious. …


Characterizing The Expression Pattern And Function Of Tartan During Drosophila Development, Alaina Baggett May 2022

Characterizing The Expression Pattern And Function Of Tartan During Drosophila Development, Alaina Baggett

Biomedical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The development of complex structures and organs by multicellular organisms relies on the ability of epithelial cells to self-organize. Epithelia are sheets of connected cells, and compartment boundaries are formed between certain epithelial cells to create distinct tissue compartments. Compartment boundaries are specialized cell-cell interfaces that are enriched for the cytoskeletal proteins actin and myosin, leading to straight cell edges under relatively high tension that act as fences keep cells from moving between compartments. In the model organism Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly), compartment boundaries in the early embryo are established in response to the non-uniform striped expression of the cell-surface …


Mutations In The N-Terminus Of The Mod(Mdg4) Btb Domain Reveal An Unexpected Role Of Mod(Mdg4) In Chromosome Segregation In Female Meiosis, Gwyneth D E Walker, Bruce D. Mckee May 2022

Mutations In The N-Terminus Of The Mod(Mdg4) Btb Domain Reveal An Unexpected Role Of Mod(Mdg4) In Chromosome Segregation In Female Meiosis, Gwyneth D E Walker, Bruce D. Mckee

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.


Harmonizing Model Organism Data In The Alliance Of Genome Resources., Alliance Of Genome Resources Consortium, Anna V. Anagnostopoulos, Susan M. Bello, Judith A. Blake, Olin Blodgett, Carol J. Bult, Karen R. Christie, Mary E. Dolan, Paul Hale, James A. Kadin, Monica S. Mcandrews, Howie Motenko, David R. Shaw, Constance M. Smith, Cynthia L. Smith, Monika Tomczuk, Laurens G. Wilming Apr 2022

Harmonizing Model Organism Data In The Alliance Of Genome Resources., Alliance Of Genome Resources Consortium, Anna V. Anagnostopoulos, Susan M. Bello, Judith A. Blake, Olin Blodgett, Carol J. Bult, Karen R. Christie, Mary E. Dolan, Paul Hale, James A. Kadin, Monica S. Mcandrews, Howie Motenko, David R. Shaw, Constance M. Smith, Cynthia L. Smith, Monika Tomczuk, Laurens G. Wilming

Faculty Research 2022

The Alliance of Genome Resources (the Alliance) is a combined effort of 7 knowledgebase projects: Saccharomyces Genome Database, WormBase, FlyBase, Mouse Genome Database, the Zebrafish Information Network, Rat Genome Database, and the Gene Ontology Resource. The Alliance seeks to provide several benefits: better service to the various communities served by these projects; a harmonized view of data for all biomedical researchers, bioinformaticians, clinicians, and students; and a more sustainable infrastructure. The Alliance has harmonized cross-organism data to provide useful comparative views of gene function, gene expression, and human disease relevance. The basis of the comparative views is shared calls of …


Glia Excitation In The Cns Modulates Intact Behaviors And Sensory-Cns-Motor Circuitry, Shelby Mccubbin, Douglas A. Harrison, Robin L. Cooper Feb 2022

Glia Excitation In The Cns Modulates Intact Behaviors And Sensory-Cns-Motor Circuitry, Shelby Mccubbin, Douglas A. Harrison, Robin L. Cooper

Biology Faculty Publications

Glial cells play a role in many important processes, though the mechanisms through which they affect neighboring cells are not fully known. Insights may be gained by selectively activating glial cell populations in intact organisms utilizing the activatable channel proteins channel rhodopsin (ChR2XXL) and TRPA1. Here, the impacts of the glial-specific expression of these channels were examined in both larval and adult Drosophila. The Glia > ChR2XXL adults and larvae became immobile when exposed to blue light and TRPA1-expressed Drosophila upon heat exposure. The chloride pump expression in glia > eNpHR animals showed no observable differences in adults or larvae. In …


Development And Characterization Of A Tissue-Specific Reporter Line For Monitoring Circadian Clock Transcriptional Activity, Lilyan Mather Jan 2022

Development And Characterization Of A Tissue-Specific Reporter Line For Monitoring Circadian Clock Transcriptional Activity, Lilyan Mather

Master's Theses

Daily rhythms in physiology and behavior are produced by a circadian system consisting of a central clock located in the brain and peripheral clocks located in various peripheral tissues. Circadian clocks track time of day through the presence of a molecular clock that functions as a transcriptional-translational feedback loop. In the nucleus, the transcription factors CLOCK (CLK) and CYCLE (CYC) activate transcription of clock genes period (per) and timeless (tim). PER and TIM proteins slowly accumulate in the cytoplasm before entering the nucleus, where they inhibit CLK and CYC, and therefore repress their own transcription. Degradation of nuclear PER and …


The Importance Of Protein Context In Spinocerebellar Ataxia Type 3, Sean Luis Johnson Jan 2022

The Importance Of Protein Context In Spinocerebellar Ataxia Type 3, Sean Luis Johnson

Wayne State University Dissertations

Spinocerebellar Ataxia Type 3 (SCA3) is a member of the family of polyglutamine (polyQ) neurodegenerative disorders that includes Huntington's Disease and several other SCAs. SCA3, the most common dominant ataxia in the world, is caused by polyQ tract expansion in the protein, ataxin-3. How SCA3 occurs and how to treat it remain unresolved issues. The primary culprit of toxicity in all polyQ diseases is the glutamine repeat: its abnormal expansion leads to neuronal dysfunction and death. With that said, there is indisputable evidence that the way polyQ-dependent toxicity presents—areas impacted, cellular processes perturbed—is predicated in large part on regions outside …


Cytoplasmically Localized Trna-Derived Fragments Inhibit Translationin Drosophila S2 Cells, Syed Muhammad Hamid, Bünyami̇n Akgül Jan 2022

Cytoplasmically Localized Trna-Derived Fragments Inhibit Translationin Drosophila S2 Cells, Syed Muhammad Hamid, Bünyami̇n Akgül

Turkish Journal of Biology

Transfer ribonucleic acids (tRNAs) serve not only as amino acid carriers during translation but also as a template for the biogenesis of short fragments that can regulate gene expression. Despite recent progress in the function of tRNA-derived fragments (tRFs), their intracellular localization, protein partners, and role in regulating translation are not well understood. We used synthetic tRFs to investigate their localization and function in Drosophila S2 cells. Under our experimental setting, all synthetic tRFs tested were localized at distinct sites within the cytoplasm in a similar manner in Drosophila S2 cells. Cytoplasmically-localized tRFs were positioned in close proximity to GW182 …


Testing The Drosophila Maternal Haploid Gene For Functional Divergence And A Role In Hybrid Incompatibility, Dean M. Castillo, Benjamin Mccormick, Connor M. Kean, Sahana Natesan, Daniel A. Barbash Jan 2022

Testing The Drosophila Maternal Haploid Gene For Functional Divergence And A Role In Hybrid Incompatibility, Dean M. Castillo, Benjamin Mccormick, Connor M. Kean, Sahana Natesan, Daniel A. Barbash

Nebraska Extension: Faculty and Staff Publications

Crosses between Drosophila simulans females and Drosophila melanogaster males produce viable F1 sons and poorly viable F1 daughters. Unlike most hybrid incompatibilities, this hybrid incompatibility violates Haldane’s rule, the observation that incompatibilities preferentially affect the heterogametic sex. Furthermore, it has a different genetic basis than hybrid lethality in the reciprocal cross, with the causal allele in Drosophila melanogaster being a large species-specific block of complex satellite DNA on its X chromosome known as the 359-bp satellite, rather than a protein-coding locus. The causal allele(s) in Drosophila simulans are unknown but likely involve maternally expressed genes or factors since the F1 …


A Combinatorial 5-Htr Expression Pattern Within The Ventral Projection Neurons Of The D. Melanogaster Olfactory Circuit., Mohd Freezely Ezzani Bin Mazri Jan 2022

A Combinatorial 5-Htr Expression Pattern Within The Ventral Projection Neurons Of The D. Melanogaster Olfactory Circuit., Mohd Freezely Ezzani Bin Mazri

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Neuromodulation allows neurons within a circuit to respond to stimuli from the environment according to the correct ecological value, context, and internal state of the animal. Serotonin (5-HT) is a neuromodulator that can generate different outcomes based on its target’s serotonin receptor (5-HTR) expression by affecting secondary messenger cascades. Within the Drosophila olfactory system, ventral projections neurons (vPN) express all five insect 5-HTR that project into two olfactory processing regions, the antennal lobe (AL) and the lateral horn (LH). The significance of this 5-HTR expression is unknown. In this study, I theorized the patterns of 5-HTR expression of vPNs. I …