The intersegmental muscles (ISMs) of the tobacco hawkmoth, Manduca sexta, undergo two periods of developmentally programmed cell death. The first period occurs during the larval/pupal transition where half of the ISMs die and the remainder persist throughout pupal development until death upon eclosion of the adult. Both periods of ISM death employ much of the same molecular machinery even though the endocrine cues for the degeneration process is different for each period of muscle death. A gene that is dramatically increased in its expression during both periods of ISM death is polyubiquitin. This gene has been isolated and characterized in this research. Despite a large amount of allelic heterogeneity in the population, it has been determined that not only is this gene increased in response to developmental cues, but that its transcript is also increased in response to stress. Therefore, polyubiquitin is multifaceted in its regulation. Due to the diverse transcriptional regulation of this gene, it was determined to be a good candidate in which to develop a method to introduce promoter/reporter constructs into the ISMs of the hawkmoth. Even though this research does not conclusively demonstrate that reporter activity after transfection of the promoter/reporter constructs is due to the polyubiquitin promoter, the research does demonstrate that DNA mediated transfection of insect muscle tissue can be achieved.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-8939 |
| Date | 01 January 1994 |
| Creators | Myer, Anita |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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