Expression of the foraging gene in adult Drosophila melanogaster

Abstract

The foraging gene in Drosophila melanogaster, which encodes a cGMP-dependent protein kinase, is a highly conserved, complex gene with multiple pleiotropic behavioral and physiological functions in both the larval and adult fly. Adult foraging expression is less well characterized than in the larva. We characterized foraging expression in the brain, gastric system, and reproductive systems using a T2A-Gal4 gene-trap allele. In the brain, foraging expression appears to be restricted to multiple sub-types of glia. This glial-specific cellular localization of foraging was supported by single-cell transcriptomic atlases of the adult brain. foraging is extensively expressed in most cell types in the gastric and reproductive systems. We then mapped multiple cis-regulatory elements responsible for parts of the observed expression patterns by a nested cloned promoter-Gal4 analysis. The mapped cis-regulatory elements were consistently modular when comparing the larval and adult expression patterns. These new data using the T2A-Gal4 gene-trap and cloned foraging promoter fusion GAL4’s are discussed with respect to previous work using an anti-FOR antibody, which we show here to be non-specific. Future studies of foraging’s function will consider roles for glial subtypes and peripheral tissues (gastric and reproductive systems) in foraging’s pleiotropic behavioral and physiological effects.

Keywords:

• Drosophila melanogaster
• foraging gene
• expression
• promoter analysis
• cis-regulatory element
• pleiotropy

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the past and present members of the Sokolowski Lab for years of helpful discussions. The authors thank Andreas Prokop for the adult Drosophila illustration and Josh Dubnau for the UAS-Watermelon line. Stocks obtained from the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (NIH P40OD018537) were used in this study. The authors thank Stephen F. Goodwin for comments on the manuscript and support for the work conducted while at the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour. The authors thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and review of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC), the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) and NIDDK grant 5R01DK70141-2 to M.B.S. A.M.A. was also supported by a Wellcome Investigator Award [106189/Z/14/Z] to Stephen F. Goodwin.