John Bell

Email

jbell@ualberta.ca

My research continues to focus on the molecular biology and genetics of wing development in Drosophila melanogaster.  Our major initiative is to identify and characterize the in vivo and in vitro interactions between the products of the vg and sd loci.  The Vg and Sd proteins act cooperatively to form a transcription complex necessary to specify wing formation, wherein Sd provides the nuclear localization signal and DNA binding ability and Vg provides the activation function necessary to express target genes. Only the TEA-DNA binding domain of Sd is necessary for wing formation since a fusion protein of full length Vg and the TEA domain of Sd (30% of Sd protein) can fully rescue sd wing mutations. This has broadened our interests to examine Sd function in other tissues, since we also have lethal alleles of Sd. We have now identified additional genes that interact with sd and vg in other tissues.