Subject: Re: The Rx gene
Rachel,
You might be interested to know, and curate, that the Drosophila
prd-type homeobox gene called Rx, reported in
Eggert et al., 1998 Isolation of a Drosophila homolog of the
vertebrate homeobox gene Rx and its possible role in brain and eye
development. Proc. Natl. Acad.Sci. USA 95(5): 2343--2348
corresponds to the 'genes' that are designated as E97, and wombat, in
Flybase. The evidence for this is in the nucleotide and amino acid
sequences of the homeobox regions of those respective clones. They
are all identical.
Although I am always reluctant to comment on matters of nomenclature,
in my opinion the Rx name deserves to be the real one, since Eggert
et al actually did some serious characterization of the gene, and all
of the previous lab names e.g. E97, bk50, PPH17, wombat were based on
highly fragmentary information......
Best, Bill