718C Poster - 11. Cell division and cell growth
Saturday April 09, 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM

Authors:
Alexandra (Olenka) Jain ^1,2; Stanislav Shvartsman ^1,2

Affiliations:
1) Princeton University; 2) Lewis-Sigler Institute of Integrative Genomics

Keywords:
q. developmental modulation; n. networks

The ability to regulate the timing of irreversible transitions between sequential developmental states is one of the most critical features of any developmental process. Understanding what controls the variation in the duration of a developmental stage is an important question in developmental biology. We address this question using Drosophila melanogaster embryogenesis because it has an extremely well-defined start and end. We describe a straightforward approach to characterize the inter-embryonic variability in the duration of embryogenesis by measuring the time of hatching events in cohorts of synchronized embryos. This approach is based on videos taken from oviposition until hatching, automated detection of hatching events, and nonparametric statistical analysis of the hatching time distributions. We demonstrate how the empirical distribution functions of hatching times can be used to study the effects of maternal age and genotype on the duration of embryogenesis. Specifically, this approach can be used to characterize the hatching distribution function of flies with a mutation in the amontillado gene, which has been shown to be important for the duration of embryogenesis (Siekhaus & Fuller, 1999). In addition to this, we revisit the connection between hatching and molecular and motor activities in the embryo.