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Updated: Nov 19, 2025

Dissection and Immunostaining of Imaginal Discs from Drosophila melanogaster
Published on: September 20, 2014
A complex gene regulatory architecture underlies the development and evolution of cuticle morphology in Drosophila
Sebastian Kittelmann1, Ella Preger-Ben Noon2, Alistair P McGregor3
1Centre for Functional Genomics, Department of Biological and Medical Sciences, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford OX3 0BP, United Kingdom.
Abstract:
The cuticle of insects is decorated with non-sensory hairs called trichomes. A few Drosophila species independently lost most of the dorso-lateral trichomes on first instar larvae. Genetic experiments revealed that this naked cuticle phenotype was caused by the evolution of enhancer function at the ovo/shavenbaby (ovo/svb) locus. Here we explore how this discovery catalyzed major new insights into morphological evolution in different developmental contexts, enhancer pleiotropy in gene regulation and the functionality and evolution of the Svb gene regulatory network (GRN). Taken together this highlights the importance of understanding the architecture and evolution of gene regulatory networks in detail and the great potential for further study of the Svb GRN.
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