Homeobrain, a novel paired-like homeobox gene is expressed in the Drosophila brain

Abstract

The homeobrain (hbn) gene is a new paired-like homeobox gene which is expressed in the embryonic brain and the ventral nerve cord. Expression of homeobrain initiates during the blastoderm stage in the anterior dorsal head primordia and the gene is persistently expressed in these cells which form parts of the brain during later embryonic stages. An additional weaker expression pattern is detected in cells of the ventral nerve cord from stage 11 on. The homeodomain in the Homeobrain protein is most similar to the Drosophila proteins DRx, Aristaless and Munster. In addition, the localized brain expression patterns of homeobrain and DRx resemble each other. Two other homeobox genes, orthopedia and DRx are clustered in the 57B region along with homeobrain. The current evidence indicates that homeobrain, DRx and orthopedia form a homeobox gene cluster in which all the members are expressed in specific embryonic brain subregions.

Genome-Wide Association Analysis of Oxidative Stress Resistance in Drosophila melanogaster

“…CG9650 is a zinc-finger-containing putative transcription factor that is a modifier of Notch signaling [54] and is involved in axon guidance [55]. hbn is a homeobox transcription factor that is expressed in the brain [56]. Since Eip75B , nAcRα-30D , ena , rg , CG9650 , and hbn have neurological function or are expressed in the brain, they are of particular interest given the relationship between oxidative stress susceptibility and neurodegenerative disease in humans [57].…”

The sea urchin animal pole domain is a Six3-dependent neurogenic patterning center

“…S3 in the supplementary material). Orthologs of Sp-Zic2 and Sp-Ac-Sc function in neural development in other embryos (Andreazzoli et al, 2003;Grinberg and Millen, 2005;Kageyama et al, 1995) and hbn is expressed in the anterior ectoderm of Drosophila (Walldorf et al, 2000) and polychaete annelids (Frobius and Seaver, 2006). Thus, Six3 is necessary for the differentiation of the non-neural cells producing long specialized cilia, serotonergic and non-serotonergic neurons and cells in the flanking ectoderm that express hbn.…”

Antagonistic action of Bicoid and the repressor Capicua determines the spatial limits of Drosophila head gene expression domains

“…We identified fragments that bound Bcd and contained torREs in the vicinity of known Bcd targets such as tll, otd, ems, btd, and overlapping enhancer modules previously identified in a computational screen as containing both Bcd binding sites and torREs [cncϩ5, btdhead, kni(Ϫ5) and slp2(Ϫ3)] (31). Additionally, we identified fragments overlapping with the enhancer module for the anterior tip expression of gt (gt(Ϫ6) (31) and in the vicinity of a number of genes of known [e.g., homeobrain (42), goosecoid (43) and Dichaete (44)] and unknown function (e.g., CG31670) with anterior expression domains (Table S1). These observations support our hypothesis that Bcd and Tor-dependent DNA-binding factors share common enhancers and together regulate the spatial limitations of anterior expression domains.…”