Tissue-specific position effects on alcohol dehydrogenase expression in Drosophila melanogaster

Twenty transformed lines have been isolated as a result of the germ line insertion of a 3.2 kb alcohol dehydrogenase (Adh) gene fragment into an Adh negative strain of Drosophila melanogaster by P element-mediated transformation. More than half of these lines exhibited abnormal ADH expression. The level of ADH expression ranges from zero in some lines to near normal levels in others, and the pattern of ADH expression in the larval gut is also abnormal in many of these lines. Each of the abnormal tissue-specific patterns is stable and characterized by the absence or reduction of ADH expression in certain tissues. High levels of ectopic expression were not observed. In two of these lines, the pattern of ADH staining is highly restricted: it is limited to the medial midgut in line MM-50, and to the gastric caecae and the proventriculus in line GC-1. In heterozygotes between these two lines ADH is expressed in both of these tissues. To test the hypothesis that this abnormal expression is due to position effects, inserts were mobilized to new locations. The mobilized inserts exhibited new patterns of tissue-specific expression associated with new cytological insert locations, showing that the abnormal expression in lines MM-50 and GC-1 is due to tissue-specific position effects and not to mutations. The results are discussed in the context of chromatin structure as a possible cause of these position effects.