An additive repression mechanism sets the anterior limits of anterior pair-rule stripes 1

Segments are repeated anatomical units forming the body of insects. In Drosophila, the specification of the body takes place during the blastoderm through the segmentation cascade. Pair-rule genes such as hairy (h), even-skipped (eve), runt (run), and fushi-tarazu (ftz) are of the intermediate level of the cascade and each pair-rule gene is expressed in seven transversal stripes along the antero-posterior axis of the embryo. Stripes are formed by independent cis-regulatory modules (CRMs) under the regulation of transcription factors of maternal source and of gap proteins of the first level of the cascade. The initial blastoderm of Drosophila is a syncytium and it also coincides with the mid-blastula transition when thousands of zygotic genes are transcribed and their products are able to diffuse in the cytoplasm. Thus, we anticipated a complex regulation of the CRMs of the pair-rule stripes. The CRMs of h 1, eve 1, run 1, ftz 1 are able to be activated by bicoid (bcd) throughout the anterior blastoderm and several lines of evidence indicate that they are repressed by the anterior gap genes slp1 (sloppy-paired 1), tll (tailless) and hkb (huckebein). The modest activity of these repressors led to the premise of a combinatorial mechanism regulating the expression of the CRMs of h 1, eve 1, run 1, ftz 1 in more anterior regions of the embryo. We tested this possibility by progressively removing the repression activities of slp1, tll and hkb. In doing so, we were able to expose a mechanism of additive repression limiting the anterior borders of stripes 1. Stripes 1 respond depending on their distance from the anterior end and repressors operating at different levels.