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Polyglutamine Repeat Proteins Disrupt Actin Structure In Drosophila Photoreceptors., Annie Vu, Tyler Humphries, Sean Vogel, Adam Haberman
Polyglutamine Repeat Proteins Disrupt Actin Structure In Drosophila Photoreceptors., Annie Vu, Tyler Humphries, Sean Vogel, Adam Haberman
Biology: Faculty Scholarship
Expansions of polygutamine-encoding stretches in several genes cause neurodegenerative disorders including Huntington's Disease and Spinocerebellar Ataxia type 3. Expression of the human disease alleles in Drosophila melanogaster neurons recapitulates cellular features of these disorders, and has therefore been used to model the cell biology of these diseases. Here, we show that polyglutamine disease alleles expressed in Drosophila photoreceptors disrupt actin structure at rhabdomeres, as other groups have shown they do in Drosophila and mammalian dendrites. We show this actin regulatory pathway works through the small G protein Rac and the actin nucleating protein Form3. We also find that Form3 has …
Retrotransposons Are The Major Contributors To The Expansion Of The Drosophila Ananassae Muller F Element, William Leung, Sarah C. R. Elgin, Adam Haberman
Retrotransposons Are The Major Contributors To The Expansion Of The Drosophila Ananassae Muller F Element, William Leung, Sarah C. R. Elgin, Adam Haberman
Biology: Faculty Scholarship
The discordance between genome size and the complexity of eukaryotes can partly be attributed to differences in repeat density. The Muller F element (~5.2 Mb) is the smallest chromosome in Drosophila melanogaster, but it is substantially larger (>18.7 Mb) in Drosophila ananassae. To identify the major contributors to the expansion of the F element and to assess their impact, we improved the genome sequence and annotated the genes in a 1.4 Mb region of the D. ananassae F element, and a 1.7 Mb region from the D element for comparison. We find that transposons (particularly LTR and LINE retrotransposons) …