The Drosophila segment polarity gene dishevelled encodes a novel protein required for response to the wingless signal.
The Drosophila Wnt-1 homolog, wingless (wg), is involved in the signaling of patterning information in several contexts. In the embryonic epidermis, Wg protein is secreted and taken up by neighboring cells, in which it is required for maintenance of engrailed transcription and accumulation of Armadillo protein. The dishevelled (dsh) gene mediates these signaling events as well as wg-dependent induction across tissue layers in the embryonic midgut. dsh is also required for the development processes in which wg functions in adult development. Overall, cells lacking dsh are unable to adopt fates specified by Wg. dsh functions cell autonomously, indicating that it is involved in the response of target cells to the Wg signal. dsh is expressed uniformly in the embryo and encodes a novel protein with no known catalytic motifs, although it shares a domain of homology with several junction-associated proteins. Our results demonstrate that dsh encodes a specific component of Wg signaling and illustrate that Wnt proteins may utilize a novel mechanism of extracellular signal transduction.
Klingensmith
J
J
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115.
Nusse
R
R
Perrimon
N
N
D048868:Adaptor Proteins, Signal Transducing; D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D000818:Animals; D001483:Base Sequence; D016764:Cell Polarity; D004247:DNA; D000072261:Dishevelled Proteins; D004330:Drosophila / Q000196:embryology / Q000235:genetics* / Q000254:growth & development; D029721:Drosophila Proteins; D004627:Embryonic Induction; D005260:Female; D008297:Male; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D010641:Phenotype; D010750:Phosphoproteins; D011506:Proteins / Q000235:genetics* / Q000502:physiology; D011518:Proto-Oncogene Proteins / Q000235:genetics*; D015183:Restriction Mapping; D017386:Sequence Homology, Amino Acid; D015398:Signal Transduction; D014158:Transcription, Genetic; D051155:Wnt1 Protein
D048868:Adaptor Proteins, Signal Transducing; D000072261:Dishevelled Proteins; D029721:Drosophila Proteins; D010750:Phosphoproteins; D011506:Proteins; D011518:Proto-Oncogene Proteins; D051155:Wnt1 Protein; C000606588:dsh protein, Drosophila; C074622:wg protein, Drosophila; D004247:DNA