New Twists in Drosophila Cell Signaling

The discovery of a handful of conserved signaling pathways that dictate most aspects of embryonic and post-embryonic development of multicellular organisms has generated a universal view of animal development (Perrimon, N., Pitsouli, C., and Shilo, B. Z. (2012)Cold Spring Harb. Perspect. Biol.4, a005975). Although we have at hand most of the "hardware" elements that mediate cell communication events that dictate cell fate choices, we are still far from a comprehensive mechanistic understanding of these processes. One of the next challenges entails an analysis of developmental signaling pathways from the cell biology perspective. Where in the cell does signaling take place, and how do general cellular machineries and structures contribute to the regulation of developmental signaling? Another challenge is to examine these signaling pathways from a quantitative perspective, rather than as crude on/off switches. This requires more precise measurements, and incorporation of the time element to generate a dynamic sequence instead of frozen snapshots of the process. The quantitative outlook also brings up the issue of precision, and the unknown mechanisms that buffer variability in signaling between embryos, to produce a robust and reproducible output. Although these issues are universal to all multicellular organisms, they can be effectively tackled in theDrosophilamodel, by a combination of genetic manipulations, biochemical analyses, and a variety of imaging techniques. This review will present some of the recent advances that were accomplished by utilizing the versatility of theDrosophilasystem.