Selector and signalling molecules cooperate in organ patterning

Abstract

Cell signalling is essential for a plethora of inductive interactions during organogenesis. Surprisingly, only a few different classes of signalling molecules mediate many inductive interactions, and these molecules are used reiteratively during development. This raises the question of how generic signals can trigger tissue-specific responses. Recent studies in Drosophila melanogaster indicate that signalling molecules cooperate with selector genes to specify particular body parts and organ types. Selector and signalling inputs are integrated at the level of cis-regulatory elements, where direct binding of both selector proteins and signal transducers is required to activate tissue-specific enhancer elements of target genes. Such enhancers include autoregulatory enhancers of the selector genes themselves, which drive the refinement of expression patterns of selector genes.