Wingless and patched are negative regulators of the morphogenetic furrow and can affect tissue polarity in the developing Drosophila compound eye

Abstract

In the developing Drosophila compound eye, a wave of pattern formation and cell-type determination sweeps across the presumptive eye epithelium. This ‘morphogenetic furrow’ coordinates the epithelial cells' division cycle, shape and gene expression to produce evenly spaced neural cell clusters that will eventually form the adult ommatidia. As these clusters develop, they rotate inwards to face the eye's equator and establish tissue polarity. We have found that wingless is strongly expressed in the dorsal margin of the presumptive eye field, ahead of the morphogenetic furrow. We have shown that inactivation of Wingless results in the induction of an ectopic furrow that proceeds ventrally from the dorsal margin. This ectopic furrow is normal in most respects, however the clusters formed by it fail to rotate, and we propose a two-vector model to account for normal rotation and tissue polarity in the retina. A second consequence of this inactivation of Wingless is that the dorsal head is largely deleted. We have also found that patched loss-of-function mosaic clones induce circular ectopic morphogenetic furrows (consistent with the observations of other workers with the hedgehog, and PKA genes). We use such patched induced furrows to test the two-vector model for cluster rotation and tissue polarity.