Roles of Bifocal, Homer, and F-actin in anchoring Oskar to the posterior cortex of Drosophila oocytes
- Kavita Babu1,2,3,
- Yu Cai2,
- Sami Bahri2,
- Xiaohang Yang2, and
- William Chia1,4
Abstract
Transport, translation, and anchoring of osk mRNA and proteins are essential for posterior patterning of Drosophila embryos. Here we show that Homer and Bifocal act redundantly to promote posterior anchoring of the osk gene products. Disruption of actin microfilaments, which causes delocalization of Bifocal but not Homer from the oocyte cortex, severely disrupts anchoring of osk gene products only when Homer (not Bifocal) is absent. Our data suggest that two processes, one requiring Bifocal and an intact F-actin cytoskeleton and a second requiring Homer but independent of intact F-actin, may act redundantly to mediate posterior anchoring of the osk gene products.
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Footnotes
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Supplemental material is available at http://www.genesdev.org.
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Article and publication are at http://www.genesdev.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gad.282604.
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↵3 Present address: Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, 1 Research Link, NUS, Singapore 117604.
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↵4 Corresponding author. E-MAIL william.chia{at}kcl.ac.uk; FAX 44-207-8486550.
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- Accepted November 26, 2003.
- Received August 13, 2003.
- Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press