Abstract
The Alhambra ( Alh) gene is the Drosophila homologue of the human AF10 gene. AF10 has been identified as a fusion partner of MLL, a human homologue of the fly gene trithorax, in infant leukemias. The endogenous function of human AF10 is not known, but may be vital to its role in acute leukemia. This prompted us to analyse Alh function. We describe here the genetic organisation of the Alh locus in D. melanogaster. We show that an independent lethal complementation group encoding a muscle protein ( Mlp84B) is located within an Alh intron. We have already shown that the leucine zipper (LZ) domain of ALH activates several Polycomb group-responsive elements. We further demonstrate that the LZ domain on its own bears the Alh vital function, since it is necessary and sufficient for rescue of Alh mutant lethality. Finally, we demonstrate that, in contrast to a previous report, Alh does not affect position-effect variegation.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Kathy Matthews and Kevin Cook at the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center, and Sami Bahri, for fly stocks. We are particularly grateful to Leone Ringrose for comments on the manuscript. L. P. was supported by the CEFIPRA (Grant No. 1603-1) and by the Société de Secours des Amis des Sciences. This work was supported by grants from the Association pour la Recherche sur la Cancer (No. 5658) and the ACI “Biologie du développement et physiologie intégrative” 2003 (BDP0026)
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Communicated by G. Reuter
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Perrin, L., Dura, JM. Molecular genetics of the Alhambra ( Drosophila AF10) complex locus of Drosophila. Mol Genet Genomics 272, 156–161 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00438-004-1042-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00438-004-1042-4