Dissection of cis-regulatory elements of the Drosophila gene Serrate

The Drosophila gene Serrate encodes a membrane spanning protein, which is expressed in a complex pattern during embryogenesis and larval stages. Loss of Serrate function leads to larval lethality, which is associated with several morphogenetic defects, including the failure to develop wings and halteres. Serrate has been suggested to act as a short-range signal during wing development. It is required for the induction of the organising centre at the dorsal/ventral compartment boundary, from which growth and patterning of the wing is controlled. In order to understand the regulatory network required to control the spatially and temporally dynamic expression of Serrate, we analysed its cis-regulatory elements by fusing various genomic fragments upstream of the reporter gene lacZ. Enhancer elements reflecting the expression pattern of endogenous Serrate in embryonic and postembryonic tissues could be confined to 26 kb of genomic DNA, including 9 kb of transcribed region. Expression in some embryonic tissues is under the control of multiple enhancers located in the 5' region and in intron sequences. The data presented here provide the tools to unravel the genetic network which regulates Serrate during different developmental stages in diverse tissues.