Functional redundancy in the tissue-specific enhancer of the Drosophila Sgs-4 gene

During the last day of larval development, the Sgs-4 glue gene of Drosophila melanogaster is expressed at high levels in a single tissue, the larval salivary glands. As shown by transformation experiments and by DNA sequence analysis of Sgs-4 underproducing strains, an essential regulatory region for Sgs-4 expression lies between 149 and 568 bp upstream from the transcribed part of the gene. This region shows the positional independence of a transcriptional enhancer and directs at least three regulatory activities: tissue specificity, developmental timing and high-level expression. Here we use a transient transformation assay to identify three elements within this enhancer that are involved in tissue specificity. For at least this regulatory activity the enhancer is internally redundant. Any pairwise combination of the three elements is sufficient to direct salivary gland expression, although none of the three can act alone.