Saturday, October 29, 2011
Hall 1-2 (San Jose Convention Center)
Stem cells have a unique ability to self-renew the stem cell population and to produce terminally differentiated cells. In order to generate a large number of terminally differentiated cells from a limited number of stem cells, the cells that do not take the stem cell fate undergo several rounds of transit-amplification before terminally differentiating. The transition from proliferation of undifferentiated daughter cells to their terminal differentiation must be tightly regulated to avoid the development of dystrophies, when differentiation occurs too early, or cancers, when differentiation occurs too late or does not occur. The Drosophila male germline stem cell lineage is a model system to study this transition. In Drosophila, bag-of-marbles (bam) is responsible for transitioning daughter cells from the proliferation stage into the differentiation stage. Because misregulation of bam can lead to tumorous phenotype its expression must be tightly regulated. It is thought to be regulated mainly by a micro RNA, mir275, that has shown high expression within the germline and contains a putative binding site in the 3’UTR of bam mRNA. We have used in situ hybridization to locate the bam mRNA transcript within Drosophila testes and are applying the same technique to locate mir275 to confirm the method of down regulation of bam within the Drosophila male germline and gain insight into the general mechanism of control on the transition of daughter cells into differentiation within a stem cell lineage.