ArticleDevelopmental biology2008
Shape and function of the Bicoid morphogen gradient in dipteran species with different sized embryos.
Article in Developmental biology, 2008. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers.
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Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed, 87 citations in OpenAlex.
- The role of geometry in morphogenesis.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2026Review
- Rapid transcriptional response to a dynamic morphogen by time integration.Current biology : CB · 2026Article
- Energetic gradients emerge in developing motor-microtubule structures.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Optimality as a framework for understanding developmental robustness.Trends in cell biology · 2026Review
- Scale invariance in early embryonic development.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Long-range formation of the Bicoid gradient requires multiple dynamic modes that spatially vary across the embryo.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2024Article
- Scale invariance in early embryonic development.ArXiv · 2023Article
- The impact of cell size on morphogen gradient precision.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2023Article
- Article
- Pseudocleavage furrows restrict plasma membrane-associated PH domain in syncytial Drosophila embryos.Biophysical journal · 2022Article
- Modulating the bicoid gradient in space and time.Hereditas · 2021Article
- How to fit in: The learning principles of cell differentiation.PLoS computational biology · 2020Article
- Article
- Scale-invariant patterning by size-dependent inhibition of Nodal signalling.Nature cell biology · 2018Article
- Article
- Size-reduced embryos reveal a gradient scaling-based mechanism for zebrafish somite formation.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2018Article
- Seeing is believing: the Bicoid protein reveals its path.Hereditas · 2018Article
- A stepwise model of reaction-diffusion and positional information governs self-organized human peri-gastrulation-like patterning.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2017Article
- Cortical movement of Bicoid in early Drosophila embryos is actin- and microtubule-dependent and disagrees with the SDD diffusion model.PloS one · 2017Article
- Scaling of morphogenetic patterns in reaction-diffusion systems.Journal of theoretical biology · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
The Bicoid morphogen evolved approximately 150 MYA from a Hox3 duplication and is only found in higher dipterans. A major difference between dipteran species, however, is the size of the embryo, which varies up to 5-fold. Although the expression of developmental factors scale with egg length, it remains unknown how this scaling is achieved. To test whether scaling is accounted for by the properties of Bicoid, we expressed eGFP fused to the coding region of bicoid from three dipteran species in transgenic Drosophila embryos using the Drosophila bicoid cis-regulatory and mRNA localization sequences. In such embryos, we find that Lucilia sericata and Calliphora vicina Bicoid produce gradients very similar to the endogenous Drosophila gradient and much shorter than what they would have produced in their own respective species. The common shape of the Drosophila, Lucilia and Calliphora Bicoid gradients appears to be a conserved feature of the Bicoid protein. Surprisingly, despite their similar distributions, we find that Bicoid from Lucilia and Calliphora do not rescue Drosophila bicoid mutants, suggesting that that Bicoid proteins have evolved species-specific functional amino acid differences. We also found that maternal expression and anteriorly localization of proteins other than Bcd does not necessarily give rise to a gradient; eGFP produced a uniform protein distribution. However, a shallow gradient was observed using eGFP-NLS, suggesting nuclear localization may be necessary but not sufficient for gradient formation.
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