Authors: Monika Zmojdzian Krzysztof Jagla
Publish Date: 2013/06/25
Volume: 354, Issue: 2, Pages: 639-645
Abstract
The Drosophila LIMhomeodomain transcription factor Tailup and its vertebrate counterpart Islet1 are expressed in cardiac progenitor cells where they play a specification role Loss of function of Islet1 leads to a complete absence of the right ventricle and affects the development of the cardiac outflow tract in mouse embryos Similarly tailup mutant embryos display a reduced number of cardiac cells but the role of tailup in cardiac outflow formation in Drosophila remains unknown Here we show that tailup is expressed in the main Drosophila cardiac outflow components ie heart anchoring cells HANC and cardiac outflow muscles COM and that loss of its function and/or tissuespecific knockdowns dramatically affect cardiac outflow morphogenesis Our data demonstrate that tailup plays many roles and is required for the acquisition of HANC and COM properties We also show that tailup regulates HANC motility COM shapes and their attachment to the heart tip and genetically interacts with ladybird shotgun and slit which are known to be involved in cardiac outflow assembly Furthemore using tissuespecific overexpression of dominant negative tailup constructs lacking sequences encoding either the homeodomain or the LIM domain we demonstrate that tailup can exert its function not only in transcription factor mode but also via its proteinprotein interaction domain We identify Tailup as an evolutionarilyconserved regulator of cardiac outflow formation and provide further evidence for its conserved role in heart development
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