The D-V axis of the Xenopus embryo, by contrast, is defined through the act of fertilization. Following entry of the sperm, the outer cortex of the egg cytoplasm rotates relative to the central core of the egg, so that the animal pole of the cortex becomes slightly shifted to one side (Figure 21–14). Treatments that block the rotation allow cleavage to occur normally but produce an embryo with a central gut and no dorsal structures or D-V asymmetry. Thus, this cortical rotation is required to define the D-V axis of the future body by creating the D-V axis of the egg.
The site of sperm entry that biases the direction of the cortical rotation in Xenopus, perhaps through the centrosome that the sperm brings into the egg— inasmuch as the rotation is associated with a reorganization of the microtubules nucleated from the centrosome in the egg cytoplasm. The reorganization leads to a microtubule-based transport of several cytoplasmic components, including the mRNA coding for Wnt11, a member of the Wnt family of signal proteins, moving cytoplasm of animal pole VENTRAL DORSAL it toward the future dorsal side (see Figure 21–14). This mRNA is soon translated and the Wnt11 protein secreted from cells that form in that region of the embryo activates the Wnt signaling pathway (see Figure 15–60). This activation is crucial for triggering the cascade of subsequent events that will organize the dorsoventral axis of the body. (The A-P axis of the embryo will only become clear later, in the process of gastrulation.)
Although different animal species use a variety of different mechanisms to specify their axes, the outcome has been relatively well conserved in evolution: head is distinguished from tail, back from belly, and gut from skin. It seems that it does not much matter what tricks the embryo uses to break the initial symmetry and set up this basic body plan.
Studies in Drosophila have revealed the Genetic control Mechanisms Underlying Development
It is the fly Drosophila, more than any other organism, that has provided the key to our present understanding of how genes govern development. Decades of genetic study culminated in a large-scale genetic screen, focusing especially on the early embryo and searching for mutations that disrupt its pattern. This revealed that the key developmental genes fall into a relatively small set of functional classes defined by their mutant phenotypes. The discovery of these genes and the subsequent analysis of their functions was a famous tour de force and had a revolutionary impact on all of developmental biology, earning its discoverers a Nobel Prize. Some parts of the developmental machinery revealed in this way are conserved between flies and vertebrates, some parts not. But the logic of the experimental approach and the general strategies of genetic control that it revealed have transformed our understanding of multicellular development in general.
To understand how the early developmental machinery operates in Drosophila, it is important to note a peculiarity of fly development. Like the eggs of other insects, but unlike most vertebrates, the Drosophila egg—shaped like a cucumber—begins its development with an extraordinarily rapid series of nuclear divisions without cell division, producing multiple nuclei in a common cytoplasm—a syncytium. The nuclei then migrate to the cell cortex, forming a structure called the syncytial blastoderm. After about 6000 nuclei have been produced, the plasma membrane folds inward between them and partitions them into separate cells, converting the syncytial blastoderm into the cellular blastoderm (Figure 21–15).
We shall see that the initial patterning of the Drosophila embryo depends on signals that diffuse through the cytoplasm at the syncytial stage and exert their actions on genes in the rapidly dividing nuclei, before the partitioning of the egg into separate cells. Here, there is no need for the usual forms of cell–cell signaling; neighboring regions of the syncytial blastoderm can communicate by means of transcription regulatory proteins that move through the cytoplasm of the giant multinuclear cell.