Cloning and characterization of the segment polarity gene cubitus interruptus Dominant of Drosophila

The segment polarity mutation, cubitus interruptus Dominant (ciD), of Drosophila melanogaster causes defects in the posterior half of every embryonic segment. We cloned sequences from the ciD region on the proximal fourth chromosome by "tagging" the gene with the transposable element P. Genetic and molecular evidence indicates that the P-element insertions, which all occurred within the same restriction fragment, are in 5'-regulatory regions of the ciD gene within 3 kb of the first exon of its transcript. The putative ciD transcript was identified on the basis of its absence in homozygous ciD embryos. Its spatial pattern of expression during development is unusual in that, unlike most other segmentation genes, it exhibits uniform expression throughout cellular blastoderm and gastrulation and does not resolve into a periodic pattern until the end of the fast phase of germ-band elongation when it is present in 15 broad segmentally repeating stripes along the anterior-posterior axis of the embryo. Registration of the ciD stripes of expression relative to the stripes of other segment polarity genes shows that ciD is expressed in the anterior three-quarters of every segment. This registration does not correlate with the pattern defects observed in ciD mutants. Sequence analysis indicates that the protein encoded by the ciD transcript contains a domain of five tandem amino acid repeats that have sequence similarity to the zinc-finger repeats of the Xenopus transcription factor TFIIIA and that share the highest degree of identity with the human zinc-finger protein GLI, which has been found to be amplified in several human glioblastomas.