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Updated: Jul 23, 2025

Dissection and Live-Imaging of the Late Embryonic Drosophila Gonad
Published on: October 17, 2020
Sex-specific splicing occurs genome-wide during early Drosophila embryogenesis
Mukulika Ray1, Ashley Mae Conard2, Jennifer Urban3
1MCB department, Brown University, Providence, United States.
None:
Sex-specific splicing is an essential process that regulates sex determination and drives sexual dimorphism. Yet, how early in development widespread sex-specific transcript diversity occurs was unknown because it had yet to be studied at the genome-wide level. We use the powerful Drosophila model to show that widespread sex-specific transcript diversity occurs early in development, concurrent with zygotic genome activation. We also present a new pipeline called time2Splice to quantify changes in alternative splicing over time. Furthermore, we determine that one of the consequences of losing an essential maternally deposited pioneer factor called CLAMP (chromatin-linked adapter for MSL proteins) is altered sex-specific splicing of genes involved in diverse biological processes that drive development. Overall, we show that sex-specific differences in transcript diversity exist even at the earliest stages of development..
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