Evolutionary conservation of midline axon guidance activity between Drosophila and Tribolium Frazzled

The regulation of midline crossing of axons is of fundamental importance for the proper development of nervous system connectivity in bilaterian animals. A number of conserved axon guidance signaling pathways coordinate to attract or repel axons at the nervous system midline to ensure the proper regulation of midline crossing. The attractive Netrin-Frazzled/DCC (Net-Fra) signaling pathway is widely conserved among bilaterians, but it is not clear whether the mechanisms by which Net and Fra promote midline crossing are also conserved. In Drosophila, Fra can promote midline crossing via Netrin-dependent and Netrin-independent mechanisms, by acting as a canonical midline attractive receptor and also through a non-canonical pathway to inhibit midline repulsion via transcriptional regulation. To examine the conservation of Fra-dependent axon guidance mechanisms among insects, in this paper we compare the midline attractive roles of the Frazzled receptor in the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) and flour beetle (Tribolium castaneum) using CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing. We replace the Drosophila fra gene with sequences encoding Drosophila Fra (DmFra) or Tribolium Fra (TcFra) and examine midline crossing of axons in the ventral nerve cord of embryos carrying these modified alleles. We show that Tribolium Fra can fully substitute for Drosophila Fra to promote midline crossing of axons in the embryonic nervous system, suggesting that the mechanisms by which Frazzled regulates midline axon guidance are evolutionarily conserved within insects.