A fertility region on the Y chromosome of Drosophila melanogaster encodes a dynein microtubule motor.

Abstract

A clone encoding a portion of the highly conserved ATP-binding domain of a dynein heavy-chain poly-

A family of dynein genes in Drosophila melanogaster.

“…Six of the dynein transcripts are abundant in testes, consistent with previous biochemical and genetic data that have shown that multiple dynein heavy chain polypeptides participate in axonemal motility (reviewed in Witman, 1992). One of the dynein genes that is expressed in testes, DhcYh3, is located on the Y chromosome within kl-5, a region that is required for male fertility (Brosseau, 1960;Hardy et al, 1981;Goldstein et al, 1982;Gepner and Hays, 1993). Another dynein gene identified in this study, Dhc64C, was previously recovered using expression cloning methods.…”

“…However, the ability of the RT-PCR strategy to amplify and to assay the presence or absence of a specific dynein sequence is supported by the DhcYh3 observations. We have shown that DhcYh3 is located on the Y chromosome (Figure 3, see also Gepner and Hays, 1993) and therefore transcripts derived from this gene should only be present in males. As shown in Figure 5A, the DhcYh3 probe detects a product only in the RT-PCR reactions that used adult male RNA as the starting template.…”

“…The mapping of DhcYh3 to a region of the Y chromosome required for male fertility (Gepner and Hays, 1993) The four remaining sequences reported for the Drosophila dynein genes, Dhcl6F, Dhc36C, Dhc62B, and Dhc98D, show similar levels of amino acid identity (46-54%) to both the sea urchin ,B heavy chain axonemal dynein sequence and all published cytoplasmic dynein sequences. For these genes, sequence comparisons within the small region in question are not useful predictors of cytoplasmic or axonemal function.…”

“…To verify the presence of introns in these genomic sequences and to identify the splice sites, the corresponding domains of both genes were amplified from a mixture of adult male and female total RNA using sequence-specific oligonucleotides (see MATERIALS AND METHODS and below); the resulting PCR products were cloned and sequenced. Compared to the cDNA clones, the genomic clones of Dhc16F and Dhc98D contain introns of 62 bp and 53 bp, respectively, near their 3' ends (see Figure (Gepner and Hays, 1993). This gene is designated DhcYh3 because of its location in heterochromatic region 3 of the Y chromosome.…”

Interspecific Y chromosome variation is sufficient to rescue hybrid male sterility and is influenced by the grandparental origin of the chromosomes

“…The Y chromosome is required for male fertility in most Drosophila species (Ashburner et al, 2005) even though it does not contain a male-determining gene. Instead, most if not all of the~14 protein-coding genes present on the Y chromosomes of Drosophila melanogaster, D. simulans and other closely related species have male-specific functions and are exclusively expressed in the testis (Gepner and Hays, 1993;Carvalho et al, 2000;Carvalho et al, 2001;Vibranovski et al, 2008). Nevertheless, a suite of studies have shown that genetic variation present on the Y of Drosophila underlie phenotypic variation in male fitness (Chippindale and Rice, 2001;Yee et al, 2015), sex ratio distortion (Carvalho et al, 1997;Montchamp-Moreau et al, 2001;Branco et al, 2013a, b), tolerance to temperature extremes (Rohmer et al, 2004;David et al, 2005), behavior (Stoltenberg and Hirsch, 1997;Huttunen and Aspi, 2003), gene expression (Lemos et al, 2008;Sackton et al, 2011;Branco et al, 2013a, b) and chromatin states in somatic tissues .…”