Developmental use of gene products in Drosophila: the maternal-zygotic transition

Recent results suggest that activity of a large fraction of the Drosophila genome is needed at multiple developmental stages. The timing of the transition from dependence on maternally stored gene products to reliance on zygotically coded products has been examined for several zygotic-lethal mutations in the z-w region of the X chromosome. The mutants differ in zygotic sensitivity to reduced maternal activity, and they have a wide range of times of lethality. Nevertheless, both temperature shift experiments and clonal analysis indicate that all of the maternal-zygotic transitions occur around the time of blastoderm formation.