Cellular Degeneration in Wing Development of the Mutant Vestigial of Drosophila Melanogaster

The mutant vestigial (vg), in which only the basal part of the wing is present, is one of the most familiar and intensively studied mutants in Drosophila melanogaster. Goldschmidt (1935) and Waddington (1940) made observations on the development of the vg wing but arrived at different conclusions as to the way in which the vg phenotype was produced. Goldschmidt proposed that the reduction of the wing was a consequence of degradation of specific parts of the wing during development. Waddington, alternately, concluded that the missing regions of the wing simply failed to develop. Both of these studies, however, were done with the light microscope, and neither author detected any histological evidence of degeneration. An electron microscope study was undertaken to establish unequivocally whether degeneration occurs in the developing vg wing. M A T E R I A L S A N D M E T H O D S