Interallelic Transcriptional Enhancement as an in Vivo Measure of Transvection in Drosophila melanogaster

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-1-2016

Publication Title

G3-genes Genomes Genetics

Department

Geisel School of Medicine

Additional Department

Department of Biological Sciences

Abstract

Transvectionpairing-dependent interallelic regulation resulting from enhancer action in transoccurs throughout the Drosophila melanogaster genome, likely as a result of the extensive somatic homolog pairing seen in Dipteran species. Recent studies of transvection in Drosophila have demonstrated important qualitative differences between enhancer action in cisvs.in trans, as well as a modest synergistic effect of cis- and trans-acting enhancers on total tissue transcript levels at a given locus. In the present study, we identify a system in which cis- and trans-acting GAL4-UAS enhancer synergism has an unexpectedly large quantitative influence on gene expression, boosting total tissue transcript levels at least fourfold relative to those seen in the absence of transvection. We exploit this strong quantitative effect by using publicly available UAS-shRNA constructs from the TRiP library to assay candidate genes for transvection activity in vivo. The results of the present study, which demonstrate that in trans activation by simple UAS enhancers can have large quantitative effects on gene expression in Drosophila, have important new implications for experimental design utilizing the GAL4-UAS system.

DOI

10.1534/g3.116.032300

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