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Updated: Aug 17, 2026

Horizontal Gel Electrophoresis for Enhanced Detection of Protein-RNA Complexes
Published on: July 28, 2017
RNA binding and translational suppression by bicoid
R Rivera-Pomar1, D Niessing, U Schmidt-Ott
1Abteilung Molekulare Entwicklungsbiologie, Max-Planck-Institut für biophysikalische Chemie, Göttingen, Germany.
Abstract:
The anterior determinant bicoid (bcd) of Drosophila is a homeodomain protein. It forms an anterior-to-posterior gradient in the embryo and activates, in a concentration-dependent manner, several zygotic segmentation genes during blastoderm formation. Its posterior counterpart, the homeodomain transcription factor caudal (cad), forms a concentration gradient in the opposite direction, emanating from evenly distributed messenger RNA in the egg. In embryos lacking bcd activity as a result of mutation, the cad gradient fails to form and cad becomes evenly distributed throughout the embryo. This suggests that bcd may act in the region-specific control of cad mRNA translation. Here we report that bcd binds through its homeodomain to cad mRNA in vitro, and exerts translational control through a bcd-binding region of cad mRNA.
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