Engrailed gene dosage determines whether certain recessive cubitus interruptus alleles exhibit dominance of the adult wing phenotype in Drosophila

Abstract

The cubitus interruptus (ci) locus of Drosophila melanogaster is needed for normal development. Some mutants of this gene result in embryonic lethality, while others just disrupt adult wing veins. While undertaking a genetic screen for additional ci mutations that affect the wing veins, we recovered a modifier mutation on chromosome two that produced a ci phenotype in recessive ci heterozygotes (cirecessive/ +). We identified the modifier mutation as an allele of engrailed and have called it engrailed-enhancer of cubitus interruptus (enEnci). As a double heterozygote (en −/+; ci−/ +) this new en allele dominantly generates a ci wing vein phenotype. As a double heterozygote, it also enhances the ci wing vein phenotype of the dominant alleles ciW and ciCe2, but not ciD. Other loss-of-function en alleles also enhance the ci phenotype, with the en lethal alleles (and deletions) showing the strongest effect, while the homozygous viable en alleles show weaker enhancement. Strong en− alleles failed to induce a ci phenotype with heterozygotes of ci recessive lethal alleles 1(4)13, 1(4)17, or ciDrev, which are loss-of-function mutations. This supports a previous proposal that the ci wing vein phenotype is not due to loss of ci+ function, as would be expected for most recessive alleles. Instead, the adult wing vein abnormality is due to ectopic expression (or de-repression) of the ci transcript in the posterior compartment of the wing disc. We also observed that en−/+ heterozygotes could induce a ci phenotype in situations where the ci+ locus is either unpaired or hemizygous. Since loss of one en+ gene dose enhanced the ci phenotype, three doses of en+ were tested and found to suppress expression of the ci phenotype in ci+ homozygotes and ciW heterozygotes. These observations show that correct regulation of the ci gene involves more than the simple interaction of upstream regulatory elements. © 1996 Wiley-Liss, Inc.