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Development 129, 3335-3348 (2002)
© 2002 The Company of Biologists Limited

The zinc finger protein REF-2 functions with the Hox genes to inhibit cell fusion in the ventral epidermis of C. elegans

Scott Alper and Cynthia Kenyon

Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco, 513 Parnassus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94143-0448, USA

Accepted 22 April 2002

During larval development in C. elegans, some of the cells of the ventral epidermis, the Pn.p cells, fuse with the growing epidermal syncytium hyp7. The pattern of these cell fusions is regulated in a complex, sexually dimorphic manner. It is essential that some Pn.p cells remain unfused in order for some sex-specific mating structures to be generated. The pattern of Pn.p cell fusion is regulated combinatorially by two genes of the C. elegans Hox gene cluster: lin-39 and mab-5. Some of the complexity in the Pn.p cell fusion pattern arises because these two Hox proteins can regulate each other’s activities. We describe a zinc-finger transcription factor, REF-2, that is required for the Pn.p cells to be generated and to remain unfused. REF-2 functions with the Hox proteins to prevent Pn.p cell fusion. ref-2 may also be a transcriptional target of the Hox proteins.

Key words: C. elegans, ref-2, Hox genes, Cell fusion, C2H2 zinc fingers, odd-paired




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© The Company of Biologists Ltd 2002