Research On The Role Of Gene Svp In Drosophila In Cell Size Controlling And The Expression Research Of Mouse Candidate Gene

Research on cell size control is a totally new field, just emerging in the international community. During normal development process, each organ of the individual has to face the ultimate choice of growth size, size control is the basic issue of developmental biology. On the other hand,cell size is also related to cancer and other human diseases, and hence research on cell size control also shows important practical significance. However, at present,research on cell size control is mainly concentrated on Drosophila eyes, wings and tumor tissue, cell growth regulation on heart precursor cells has not been studied yet.Svp (seven-up) encodes an orphan receptor which belongs to the steroid receptor family. Svp gene was first discovered to regulate photoreceptor-cell and nerve cell differentiation in the complex eyes of Drosophila. Later, svp was found to regulate heart precursor cells in Drosophila too. Drosophila heart is a linear tubular structure, located in the dorsal midline of the embryo,composed by contractive myocardial cells and non contractive pericardial cells. Svp is expressed in myocardial cells as well as in pericardial cells of the heart tube. Whether svp is related to cell size control of heart precursor cells has not been reported yet. Using RNAi and immunohistochemistry techniques and heart-specific antibodies, we checked the phenotypes of different kind of svp mutants as well as svp related gene mutant embryoes, so as to identify the role of svp envolved in cell size controlling.In the mean time, by the help of whole mount in suit hybridization , western blotting, immunohistochemistry and other techniques, we also performed expression studies of mouse homologs of a series of human heart development candidate genes, which would lay a foundation for these genes' functional study in future.