Inoue, K., Hoshijima, K., Higuchi, I., Sakamoto, H., Shimura, Y. (1992). Binding of the Drosophila transformer and transformer-2 proteins to the regulatory elements of doublesex primary transcript for sex-specific RNA processing.  Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 89(): 8092--8096.

FBrf0057558

Research paper

Sex-specific alternative processing of double-sex (dsx) precursor messenger RNA (pre-mRNA) is one of the key steps that regulates somatic sexual differentiation in Drosophila melanogaster. By transfection analyses using dsx minigene constructs, we identified six copies of the 13-nucleotide sequences TC(T/A)(T/A)C(A/G)ATCAACA in the female-specific fourth exon that act as the cis elements for the female-specific splicing of dsx pre-mRNA. UV-crosslinking experiments revealed that both female-specific transformer (tra) and transformer-2 (tra-2) products bind to the 13-nucleotide sequences of dsx pre-mRNA. These results strongly suggest that the female-specific splicing of dsx pre-mRNA is activated by binding of these proteins to the 13-nucleotide sequences.

PMC49862 (PMC) (EuropePMC)