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Letters to Nature

Nature 385, 64-67 (2 January 1997) | doi:10.1038/385064a0; Accepted 30 October 1996

The Drosophila protein Wunen repels migrating germ cells

Nian Zhang*†, Jiaping Zhang†‡, Karen J. Purcell§, Yan Cheng†parallel & Ken Howard†§¶

  1. *The Jackson Laboratory, 600 Main Street, Bar Harbor, Maine 04609, USA
  2. †Roche Institute of Molecular Biology, Roche Research Center, 340 Kingsland Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07110, USA
  3. ‡Department of Virus and Cell Biology, Merck Research Laboratories, West Point, Pennsylvania 19486, USA
  4. §Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine, Yale University School of Medicine, Departments of Cell Biology and Biology, 295 Congress Avenue, P.O. Box 9812, New Haven, Connecticut 06536-0812, USA
  5. parallelDepartment of Biological Sciences, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, USA
  6. Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK
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INDrosophila, germ cells migrate in embryonic development from the lumen of the developing gut towards the overlying mesoderm, where they enter the gonads1,2. The gene wunen is responsible for guiding the germ cells early in this process3. Here we report that the protein Wunen has two properties that allow it to use repulsion to guide the germ cells. Wunen can transform a permissive cellular environment into a repulsive one, and is expressed in the gut in a pattern that guides germ cells towards the mesoderm. Wunen shows strong similarity to the enzyme type 2 phosphatidic acid phophatase(PAP2)4, suggesting that it is involved in lipid metabolism.

We have previously mapped the gene wunen (wun) to 45D on the second chromosome3, and subsequently identified a wun allele, wunKlom, induced by a marked P element from a large-scale screen5. Excision of this P element reverts wunKlom, indicating it is the wun mutagen in this allele.