Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 11, 2026

Quantitative Comparison of cis-Regulatory Element (CRE) Activities in Transgenic Drosophila melanogaster
Published on: December 19, 2011
Nucleotide variation and conservation at the dpp locus, a gene controlling early development in Drosophila
B Richter1, M Long, R C Lewontin
1Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
Abstract:
A study of polymorphism and species divergence of the dpp gene of Drosophila has been made. Eighteen lines from a population of D. melanogaster were sequenced for 5200 bp of the Hin region of the gene, coding for the dpp polypeptide. A comparison was made with sequence from D. simulans. Ninety-six silent polymorphisms and three amino acid replacement polymorphisms were found. The overall silent polymorphism (0.0247) is low, but haplotype diversity (0.0066 for effectively silent sites and 0.0054 for all sites) is in the range found for enzyme loci. Amino acid variation is absent in the N-terminal signal peptide, the C-terminal TGF-beta peptide and in the N-terminal half of the pro-protein region. At the nucleotide level there is strong conservation in the middle half of the large-intron and in the 3' untranslated sequence of the last exon. The 3' untranslated conservation, which is perfect for 110 bp among all the divergent species, is unexplained. There is strong positive linkage disequilibrium among polymorphic sites, with stretches of apparent gene conversion among originally divergent sequences. The population apparently is a migration mixture of divergent clades.
Related Concept Videos
Conservation of Protein Domains Over Different Proteins
A limited set of protein domains often duplicate and recombine during evolution. These domains can be organized in different combinations to form...
Position-effect Variegation
Cis-regulatory Sequences
Multi-species Conserved Sequences
Although the genome of each species varies greatly from each other, a few sequences are highly conserved. Such conserved DNA...
Exon Recombination
Exon shuffling follows “splice frame rules.” Each exon has three reading...
Comparing Copy Number Variations and SNPs
Copy number variations or CNVs are the structural variations that cover more than 1kb of DNA sequence. The single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), on the other hand, is a single nucleotide change or a point mutation that is found in more than 1%...

