What is it about?
Seeing the world in color requires different subtypes of photoreceptor neurons that each express a different color-sensing visual pigment. To unravel the molecular mechanisms that generate these spatially precise visual pigment expression patterns, we used the fly eye as a model system.
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Why is it important?
We gained insights into the rules (sometimes called ‘grammar’) that underlie the generation of the spatially distinct expression patterns of color-sensing pigments in different photoreceptor subtypes. Notably, unique combinations of short and often repeated DNA sequences (sometimes called ‘vocabulary’) in the regulatory DNA of each visual pigment gene define the precise and mutually exclusive expression patterns of different color-sensing pigments.
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This page is a summary of: A combinatorial cis-regulatory logic restricts color-sensing Rhodopsins to specific photoreceptor subsets in Drosophila, PLoS Genetics, June 2021, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1009613.
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