TY - JOUR
T1 - Sex-lethal, a Drosophila sex determination switch gene, exhibits sex-specific RNA splicing and sequence similarity to RNA binding proteins
AU - Bell, Leslie R.
AU - Maine, Eleanor M.
AU - Schedl, Paul
AU - Cline, Thomas W.
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to Helen Salz for providing the Northern blot used for lanes a and b of Figure 3, to Ruth Steward for help with sequencing techniques, and to Claire Cronmiller for help with some experiments and for many discussions. We thank Gretchen Calhoun for determining some of the genomic sequence, Phil Hinds for participation in an early phase of sequencing, Helen Salz, Linda Keyes, and Mark Samuels for stimulating discussions and sharing unpublished results. We thank John Yochem for helpful comments on the manuscript. This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health to T W. C. and P. S. L. B. was an NIH postdoctoral fellow.
PY - 1988/12/23
Y1 - 1988/12/23
N2 - The switch gene, Sex-lethal (Sxl), controls sexual development and dosage compensation. It must be active in females and inactive in males throughout development. Analysis of Sxl cDNAs shows that this on/off regulation may be explained by differential RNA splicing; only female transcripts appear to encode functional products, whereas all male transcripts contain an exon that truncates the open reading frame. The functional female product shows sequence similarities with ribonucleoproteins, suggesting that it is an RNA binding protein. Thus, we propose that Sxl encodes a factor that interacts with both its own pre-mRNA (accounting for positive autoregulation) and that of downstream genes to confer female-specific splicing. In this way, a single, simple mechanism could account for both the maintenance and expression of the sexually determined state.
AB - The switch gene, Sex-lethal (Sxl), controls sexual development and dosage compensation. It must be active in females and inactive in males throughout development. Analysis of Sxl cDNAs shows that this on/off regulation may be explained by differential RNA splicing; only female transcripts appear to encode functional products, whereas all male transcripts contain an exon that truncates the open reading frame. The functional female product shows sequence similarities with ribonucleoproteins, suggesting that it is an RNA binding protein. Thus, we propose that Sxl encodes a factor that interacts with both its own pre-mRNA (accounting for positive autoregulation) and that of downstream genes to confer female-specific splicing. In this way, a single, simple mechanism could account for both the maintenance and expression of the sexually determined state.
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U2 - 10.1016/0092-8674(88)90248-6
DO - 10.1016/0092-8674(88)90248-6
M3 - Article
C2 - 3144435
AN - SCOPUS:0024245815
SN - 0092-8674
VL - 55
SP - 1037
EP - 1046
JO - Cell
JF - Cell
IS - 6
ER -