Umeå University's logo

The Pax-6 protein is vital for eye development in all seeing animals, from sea urchins to humans. Either of the Pax6 genes in Drosophila (twin of eyeless and eyeless) can induce a gene cascade leading to formation of entire eyes when expressed ectopically. The twin of eyeless (toy) gene in Drosophila is expressed in the anterior region of the early fly embryo. At later stages it is expressed in the brain, ventral nerve cord and (eventually) the visual primordium that gives rise to the eye-antennal imaginal discs of the larvae. These discs subsequently form the major part of the adult head, including compound eyes. We have searched for genes that are required for normal toy expression in the early embryo to elucidate initiating events of eye organogenesis. Candidate genes identified by mutation analyses were subjected to further knock-out and miss-expression tests to investigate their interactions with toy. Our results indicate that the head-specific gap gene empty spiracles can act as a repressor of Toy, while ocelliless (oc) and spalt major (salm) appear to act as positive regulators of toy gene expression. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The specification of the eye-antennal disc primordium in the Drosophila embryo requires the expression of two paralogous Pax6 genes: twin of eyeless (toy) and eyeless (ey). toy is considered to be the first eye specification gene expressed in the regulatory network that governs eye formation and the gene that, in turn, activates eyeless. What regulates toy expression is, however, still unclear. We show, by misexpression and mutant analysis, that the head-specific gene empty spiracles alters the expression pattern of Toy in the head region around the visual primordia.