Molecular Lessons from the Drosophila Bithorax Complex

Abstract

The Genetics Society of America's (GSA's) Edward Novitski Prize recognizes a single experimental accomplishment or a body of work in which an exceptional level of creativity, and intellectual ingenuity, has been used to design and execute scientific experiments to solve a difficult problem in genetics. The 2020 recipient is Welcome W. Bender of Harvard Medical School, recognizing his creativity and ingenuity in revealing the molecular nature and regulation of the bithorax gene complex.

Figure 1

Regulatory Domains of the bithorax complex. A diagram of an adult female fly shows the body segments specified by the BX-C, including the third thoracic (T3) and 10 abdominal segments (A1–A10). The 8th, 9th, and 10th abdominal segments contribute only small rudiments. The map below shows the embryonic binding sites of the CTCF protein along the 325 kb extent of the BX-C (Bowman et al. 2014). At the bottom are shown the transcription units of the three homeobox genes, Ubx, abd-A, and Abd-B. The colored blocks of the map show 11 successive regulatory domains, marked with parasegment numbers (PS5-15). The arrows connect the body segments with their corresponding parasegmental domains. Most domain boundaries correspond to CTCF binding sites. The righthand boundaries of domains PS5-7 and PS11-14 have been confirmed by mapping the extent of histone modifications (H3K27me3) in nuclei from single parasegments (Bowman et al. 2014; S. Tabor, H. Domingues, and W. Bender, unpublished data).