title: A comparative analysis of highly conserved sex-determining genes between Apis mellifera and Drosophila melanogaster.
abstract: A comparison of the most conserved sex-determining genes between the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, and the honey bee, Apis mellifera, was performed with bioinformatics tools developed for computational molecular biology. An initial set of protein sequences already described in the fruit fly as participants of the sex-determining cascade was retrieved from the Gene Ontology database (http://www.geneontology.org/) and aligned against a database of protein sequences predicted from the honey bee genome. The doublesex (dsx) gene is considered one of the most conserved sex-determining genes among metazoans, and a male-specific partial cDNA of putative A. mellifera dsx gene (Amdsx) was identified experimentally. The theoretical predictions were developed in the context of sequence similarity. Experimental evidence indicates that dsx is present in embryos and larvae, and that it encodes a transcription factor widely conserved in metazoans, containing a DM DNA-binding domain implicated in the regulation of the expression of genes involved in sexual phenotype formation.
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Matemática e Estatística, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, SP, Brazil. alexsc@rge.fmrp.usp.br
authors.forename: Alexandre S
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Cristino
authors.forename: Adriana Mendes do
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Nascimento
authors.forename: Luciano da Fontoura
authors.initials: Lda F
authors.lastname: Costa
authors.forename: Zilá Luz Paulino
authors.initials: ZL
authors.lastname: Simões
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001516:Bees / Q000235:genetics*; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D017124:Conserved Sequence / Q000235:genetics*; D004268:DNA-Binding Proteins / Q000235:genetics; D029721:Drosophila Proteins / Q000235:genetics; D004331:Drosophila melanogaster / Q000235:genetics*; D005260:Female; D017344:Genes, Insect / Q000235:genetics*; D008297:Male; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D016133:Polymerase Chain Reaction; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA / Q000379:methods; D019849:Sex Determination Processes
chemical_list: D004268:DNA-Binding Proteins; C070369:DSX protein, Drosophila; D029721:Drosophila Proteins