Regulation of segment polarity genes in the Drosophila blastoderm by fushi tarazu and even skipped

During the late cellular blastoderm stage of Drosophila embryogenesis the segmentation genes engrailed, en, and wingless, wg, become expressed in two series of 14 stripes^1-4 which will subsequently coincide with the anterior⁵ and posterior⁴ limits of each parasegment ⁶. Previous studies^7-10 have shown that the establishment of the pattern of en stripes depends upon the activity of the homoeobox-containing pair-rule genes¹¹ fushi tarazu, ftz¹² and even skipped, eve^8,13. Here we show that these two genes also control the spatial expression of wg. Whereas ftz and eve behave as activators of en we find that both genes are required to repress wg expression, so that wg becomes expressed only in the narrow stripes of cells which come to separate the ftz and eve bands at the end of the blastoderm stage. In contrast, we propose that the precise positioning of the en stripes depends upon signals generated in a combinatorial manner¹⁴ by the overlaps between the ftz or eve domains and those of other pair rule genes, specifically odd paired, opa ¹⁵ and paired, prd^11,16,17.