Abstract
mRNA synthesis is one of the earliest readouts of the activity of a transcribed gene, which is of particular interest in the context of metazoan cell fate specification. These processes are intrinsically dynamic and stochastic, which makes in vivo single-cell measurements inevitable. Here, we present the application of a technology that has been widely used in single celled organisms to measure transcriptional activity in developing embryos of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The method allows for quantification of instantaneous polymerase occupancy of active gene loci and thereby enables the development and testing of models of gene regulation in development.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful through support provided by the Princeton Dickie Fellowship (H.G.), the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface (H.G.), the Sloan Research Foundation (H.G.), the Searle Scholars Program (T.G. and H.G.), the Shurl & Kay Curci Foundation (H.G.), the Human Frontier Science Program (H.G.), and the National Institutes of Health Grants P50 GM071508 and R01 GM097275 (T.G.).
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Garcia, H.G., Gregor, T. (2018). Live Imaging of mRNA Synthesis in Drosophila . In: Gaspar, I. (eds) RNA Detection. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1649. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7213-5_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7213-5_23
Publisher Name: Humana Press, New York, NY
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