Cloning sequences from the hairy gene of Drosophila

A series of mutations that alter the pattern of segmentation in Drosophila embryos has been identified. Mutations in one of these loci, hairy, delete the posterior part of each odd-numbered segment and the anterior part of each even-numbered segment; although the amount deleted depends on the allele. Weak alleles delete less than an entire segment and do not always eliminate structures in every other segment. Strong alleles show the same periodicity in the pattern defect, but delete regions greater than one segment. In such cases the remaining parts of the pattern duplicate with mirror-image symmetry. To study the function of this gene at a molecular level, sequences from the hairy locus were cloned. This was facilitated by the hairy1 (h1) mutation, which is caused by the insertion of the transposable element, gypsy.