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Early Retinal Development in Drosophila

  • Chapter
Vertebrate Eye Development

Part of the book series: Results and Problems in Cell Differentiation ((RESULTS,volume 31))

Abstract

Like other insects, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has a compound eye, made up of approximately 800 individual eyes or ommatidia. The eye arises from the eye imaginal disk, which is part of the compound eye-antennal disk. The cells that will form this disk invaginate from the ectoderm during late embryogenesis (Jurgens and Hartenstein 1993); the disk primordium then grows inside the larva, where it consists of an epithelial bilayer. One columnar layer will give rise to all the cell types of the retina; it is covered by a squamous epithelial sheet called the peripodial membrane, which later contributes to the surface of the head (Haynie and Bryant 1986). Differentiation of the retina begins in the third of the three larval stages, known as instars, and continues during the first few days of pupal development (Ready et al. 1976; Fig. 1). In spite of the many morphological and developmental differences between fly and vertebrate eyes, many of the molecules involved appear to be conserved.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anatomy, Programs in Neuroscience and Developmental Biology, University of California, San Francisco, 513 Parnassus Avenue, San Francisco, California, 94143-0452, USA

    Ulrike Heberlein

  2. Skirball Institute for Biomolecular Medicine, Developmental Genetics Program, NYU Medical Center, 540 First Avenue, New York, New York, 0016, USA

    Jessica E. Treisman

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  1. Ulrike Heberlein
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  2. Jessica E. Treisman
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Vision Research Laboratories, New England Eye Center, Tufts University School of Medicine, 750 Washington Street, Box 450, Boston, MA, 02111, USA

    M. Elizabeth Fini Ph. D.

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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Heberlein, U., Treisman, J.E. (2000). Early Retinal Development in Drosophila . In: Fini, M.E. (eds) Vertebrate Eye Development. Results and Problems in Cell Differentiation, vol 31. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-46826-4_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-46826-4_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-53678-6

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