The seven-pass transmembrane atypical cadherin, Flamingo (also known as Starry Night) is evolutionally conserved in both structure and function in vertebrates and invertebrates. It plays important roles during the establishment of planar cell polarity (PCP) of epithelial tissues and during the development of axons and dendrites in both peripheral and central neurons. / This thesis looks at the role of Flamingo/Starry Night in axon growth and guidance in the embryonic abdominal peripheral nervous system (PNS) of Drosophila. It describes the expression pattern of Flamingo in the PNS and its environment. A combination of single cell labelling and immunohistochemical techniques was used to define the effect of mutations in flamingo as well as several genes coding for potential Flamingo interaction partners. Rescue- and over-/mis-expression experiments featuring targeted expression of either a wild type version or mutant versions of flamingo provide information on the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which Flamingo regulates sensory axon development. Loss of Flamingo function results in a highly penetrant axon stall phenotype. Both sensory and motor axons frequently halt their advance early along their normal trajectories. Flamingo appears to mediate an axon growth promoting signal upon contact of sensory growth cones with specific early intermediate targets. Expression of Flamingo in sensory neurons is sufficient to rescue the mutant sensory axon phenotype. This rescue is at least partially independent of most of the extracellular region of the Flamingo protein. While Flamingo was previously found to have homophilic adhesion properties in vitro and appears to function by a homophilic mechanism during the neurite development of several types of neurons, this study supports a heterophilic signalling mechanism by which Flamingo fulfils its role in abdominal sensory axon growth promotion.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/245339 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Steinel, Martin Claus |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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