Many generations of biologists have been intrigued by the myriad structures that eukaryotic chromosomes can adopt and have questioned how their form relates to function [1,2]. One organizational state that chromosomes adopt is pairing in a homology-dependent manner [3–8]. Although homolog pairing in meiosis has been extensively studied and is important for chromosome segregation, pairing of hom...

HE sequence of meiotic events that results in synapsis is not clear. It is diffiTcult to observe chromosome behavior in early stages of meiosis even in favorable fixed material, and the early oocytes of Drosophila melanogaster are certainly not favorable cytological material. However, the many well-mapped mutant genes and the polytene chromosomes of the salivary glands of this species make it p...

JIL-1 is the major kinase controlling the phosphorylation state of histone H3S10 at interphase in Drosophila. In this study, we used three different commercially available histone H3S10 phosphorylation antibodies, as well as an acid-free polytene chromosome squash protocol that preserves the antigenicity of the histone H3S10 phospho-epitope, to examine the role of histone H3S10 phosphorylation ...

pDm plasmids were constructed from D. melanogaster and pSC101 DNAs by a modification of the EcoR1-ligase method which insured that each hybrid molecule contained a single segment of D. melanogaster chromosomal DNA (Dm segment). The sequences in the Dm segments of six cloned pDm DNAs were mapped within the D. melanogaster polytene chromosomes by in situ hybridization, and their repetition freque...

The rates and patterns of molecular evolution in many eukaryotic organisms have been shown to be influenced by the compartmentalization of their genomes into fractions of distinct base composition and mutational properties. We have examined the Drosophila genome to explore relationships between the nucleotide content of large chromosomal segments and the base composition and rate of evolution o...

Dynamic regulation of chromosome structure and organization is critical for fundamental cellular processes such as gene expression and chromosome segregation. Condensins are conserved chromosome-associated proteins that regulate a variety of chromosome dynamics, including axial shortening, lateral compaction, and homolog pairing. However, how the in vivo activities of condensins are regulated a...

Almost 60 years have elapsed since the discovery of variation in the polytene chromosomes of Drosophila (Sturtevant and Dobzhansky 1936). Inversion polymorphism studies have revealed some of the intricacies of evolutionary change, but even now, when interest in them has waned, there is little understanding of the particular alleles contained within them that alone or in relation to other genes ...