Lisa Simirenko

Developmental roles of 21 Drosophila transcription factors are determined by quantitative differences in binding to an overlapping set of thousands of genomic regions

BackgroundWe previously established that six sequence-specific transcription factors that initiate anterior/posterior patterning in Drosophila bind to overlapping sets of thousands of genomic regions in blastoderm embryos. While regions bound at high levels include known and probable functional targets, more poorly bound regions are preferentially associated with housekeeping genes and/or genes not transcribed in the blastoderm, and are frequently found in protein coding sequences or in less conserved non-coding DNA, suggesting that many are likely non-functional.ResultsHere we show that an additional 15 transcription factors that regulate other aspects of embryo patterning show a similar quantitative continuum of function and binding to thousands of genomic regions in vivo. Collectively, the 21 regulators show a surprisingly high overlap in the regions they bind given that they belong to 11 DNA binding domain families, specify distinct developmental fates, and can act via different cis-regulatory modules. We demonstrate, however, that quantitative differences in relative levels of binding to shared targets correlate with the known biological and transcriptional regulatory specificities of these factors.ConclusionsIt is likely that the overlap in binding of biochemically and functionally unrelated transcription factors arises from the high concentrations of these proteins in nuclei, which, coupled with their broad DNA binding specificities, directs them to regions of open chromatin. We suggest that most animal transcription factors will be found to show a similar broad overlapping pattern of binding in vivo, with specificity achieved by modulating the amount, rather than the identity, of bound factor.

Three-dimensional morphology and gene expression in the Drosophila blastoderm at cellular resolution I: data acquisition pipeline

BackgroundTo model and thoroughly understand animal transcription networks, it is essential to derive accurate spatial and temporal descriptions of developing gene expression patterns with cellular resolution.ResultsHere we describe a suite of methods that provide the first quantitative three-dimensional description of gene expression and morphology at cellular resolution in whole embryos. A database containing information derived from 1,282 embryos is released that describes the mRNA expression of 22 genes at multiple time points in the Drosophila blastoderm. We demonstrate that our methods are sufficiently accurate to detect previously undescribed features of morphology and gene expression. The cellular blastoderm is shown to have an intricate morphology of nuclear density patterns and apical/basal displacements that correlate with later well-known morphological features. Pair rule gene expression stripes, generally considered to specify patterning only along the anterior/posterior body axis, are shown to have complex changes in stripe location, stripe curvature, and expression level along the dorsal/ventral axis. Pair rule genes are also found to not always maintain the same register to each other.ConclusionThe application of these quantitative methods to other developmental systems will likely reveal many other previously unknown features and provide a more rigorous understanding of developmental regulatory networks.

A Conserved Developmental Patterning Network Produces Quantitatively Different Output in Multiple Species of Drosophila

Differences in the level, timing, or location of gene expression can contribute to alternative phenotypes at the molecular and organismal level. Understanding the origins of expression differences is complicated by the fact that organismal morphology and gene regulatory networks could potentially vary even between closely related species. To assess the scope of such changes, we used high-resolution imaging methods to measure mRNA expression in blastoderm embryos of Drosophila yakuba and Drosophila pseudoobscura and assembled these data into cellular resolution atlases, where expression levels for 13 genes in the segmentation network are averaged into species-specific, cellular resolution morphological frameworks. We demonstrate that the blastoderm embryos of these species differ in their morphology in terms of size, shape, and number of nuclei. We present an approach to compare cellular gene expression patterns between species, while accounting for varying embryo morphology, and apply it to our data and an equivalent dataset for Drosophila melanogaster. Our analysis reveals that all individual genes differ quantitatively in their spatio-temporal expression patterns between these species, primarily in terms of their relative position and dynamics. Despite many small quantitative differences, cellular gene expression profiles for the whole set of genes examined are largely similar. This suggests that cell types at this stage of development are conserved, though they can differ in their relative position by up to 3–4 cell widths and in their relative proportion between species by as much as 5-fold. Quantitative differences in the dynamics and relative level of a subset of genes between corresponding cell types may reflect altered regulatory functions between species. Our results emphasize that transcriptional networks can diverge over short evolutionary timescales and that even small changes can lead to distinct output in terms of the placement and number of equivalent cells.

PointCloudExplore 2: Visual exploration of 3D gene expression

To better understand how developmental regulatory networks are defined inthe genome sequence, the Berkeley Drosophila Transcription Network Project (BDNTP)has developed a suite of methods to describe 3D gene expression data, i.e.,the output of the network at cellular resolution for multiple time points. To allow researchersto explore these novel data sets we have developed PointCloudXplore (PCX).In PCX we have linked physical and information visualization views via the concept ofbrushing (cell selection). For each view dedicated operations for performing selectionof cells are available. In PCX, all cell selections are stored in a central managementsystem. Cells selected in one view can in this way be highlighted in any view allowingfurther cell subset properties to be determined. Complex cell queries can be definedby combining different cell selections using logical operations such as AND, OR, andNOT. Here we are going to provide an overview of PointCloudXplore 2 (PCX2), thelatest publicly available version of PCX. PCX2 has shown to be an effective tool forvisual exploration of 3D gene expression data. We discuss (i) all views available inPCX2, (ii) different strategies to perform cell selection, (iii) the basic architecture ofPCX2., and (iv) illustrate the usefulness of PCX2 using selected examples.

PointCloudXplore: a visualization tool for 3D gene expressiondata

PointCloudXplore: A Visualization Tool for 3D Gene Expression Data Oliver R¨ bel ∗,1,2 , Gunther H. Weber 2,3 , Soile V.E. Ker¨ nen 3 , Charless C. Fowlkes 4 , u a Cris L. Luengo Hendriks 3 , Lisa Simirenko 3 , Nameeta Y. Shah 2 , Michael B. Eisen 3 , Mark D. Biggin 3 , Hans Hagen 1 , Damir Sudar 3 , Jitendra Malik 4 , David W. Knowles 3 , and Bernd Hamann 1,2 International Research Training Group “Visualization of Large and Unstructured Data Sets,” University of Kaiserslautern, Germany Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization, University of California, Davis, CA, USA Life Sciences and Genomics Divisions, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA Abstract: The Berkeley Drosophila Transcription Network Project (BDTNP) has de- veloped a suite of methods that support quantitative, computational analysis of three- dimensional (3D) gene expression patterns with cellular resolution in early Drosophila embryos, aiming at a more in-depth understanding of gene regulatory networks. We describe a new tool, called PointCloudXplore (PCX), that supports effective 3D gene expression data exploration. PCX is a visualization tool that uses the established visualization techniques of multiple views, brushing, and linking to support the analysis of high-dimensional datasets that describe many genes’ expression. Each of the views in PointCloudXplore shows a different gene expression data property. Brushing is used to select and em- phasize data associated with defined subsets of embryo cells within a view. Linking is used to show in additional views the expression data for a group of cells that have first been highlighted as a brush in a single view, allowing further data subset properties to be determined. In PCX, physical views of the data are linked to abstract data displays such as parallel coordinates. Physical views show the spatial relationships between different genes’ expression patterns within an embryo. Abstract gene expression data displays on the other hand allow for an analysis of relationships between different genes directly in the gene expression space. We discuss on parallel coordinates as one example abstract data view currently available in PCX. We have developed several ex- tensions to standard parallel coordinates to facilitate brushing and the visualization of 3D gene expression data. ∗ oliverruebel@web.de