REGULATION OF WINGLESS (WG) IN DROSOPHILA DURING WING REGENERATION

Regeneration is the process in which whole tissues and organs restore themselves after damage. Humans have limited regenerative capacity, so model organisms are used to study regeneration in the hopes to improve a human’s capability to regenerate whole tissues. Drosophila is ideal for this because of the conservation of genes that correlate to the human genome, and because of the speed at which it can produce future generations and take on observable mutations. Drosophila larval wing tissue can regenerate, and by using a genetic-based ablation system we can easily visualize and investigate regeneration by scoring adult wing size. The ablation system acts by inducing apoptosis in the larval wings via a heat shift to express apoptotic-promoting genes. Using this system, a number of genes have been discovered to be important for regeneration, such as wingless (wg). Wg is required during Drosophila development and has mammalian orthologs. Recently, a wg enhancer has been identified that is not necessarily required for development, but might be for regeneration. The goal of this work is to investigate the importance of this enhancer during regeneration. This will be done by deleting the enhancer region and studying the effects on regeneration in the wings, and by also using GFP reporter genes that show how this region controls expression during regeneration. The reporters include both full length and various segments. This work will hopefully uncover the regulation of a conserved signal during regeneration in Drosophila.