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  • The EMBO Journal (1997) 16, 3944 - 3954
  • doi:10.1093/emboj/16.13.3944

A new gene encoding a putative transcription factor regulated by the Drosophila circadian clock

François Rouyer2, Mohammed Rachidi3, Claudio Pikielny4 and Michael Rosbash1

  1. HHMI and Department of Biology, Brandeis University, Waltham MA 02254, USA
  2. Present address: Institut Alfred Fessard, CNRS UPR 2212, 91198 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
  3. Dépt de Biologie Moléculaire, Institut Pasteur, Paris, France
  4. Present address: UMDNJ/Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Piscataway, NJ, USA

Correspondence to:

François Rouyer, E-mail: rouyer@iaf.cnrs.gif.fr

Received 4 December 1996; Revised 2 April 1997

Circadian rhythms of locomotor activity and eclosion in Drosophila depend upon the reciprocal autoregulation of the period (per) and timeless (tim) genes. As part of this regulatory loop, per and tim mRNA levels oscillate in a circadian fashion. Other cycling transcripts may participate in this central pacemaker mechanism or represent outputs of the clock. In this paper, we report the isolation of Crg-1, a new circadianly regulated gene. Like per and tim transcript levels, Crg-1 transcript levels oscillate with a 24 h period in light:dark (LD) conditions, with a maximal abundance at the beginning of the night. These oscillations persist in complete darkness and depend upon per and tim proteins. The putative CRG-1 proteins show some sequence similarity with the DNA-binding domain of the HNF3/fork head family of transcription factors. In the adult head, in situ hybridization analysis reveals that per and Crg-1 have similar expression patterns in the eyes and optic lobes.

  • Keywords:

    • circadian rhythm,
    • Drosophila,
    • optic lobes,
    • period gene