A hypothesis for the origin and evolution of chromomere DNA

Genetic organization of interphase chromosome bands and interbands in Drosophila melanogaster

Drosophila melanogaster polytene chromosomes display specific banding pattern; the underlying genetic organization of this pattern has remained elusive for many years. In the present paper, we analyze 32 cytology-mapped polytene chromosome interbands. We estimated molecular locations of these interbands, described their molecular and genetic organization and demonstrate that polytene chromosome interbands contain the 5' ends of housekeeping genes. As a rule, interbands display preferential "head-to-head" orientation of genes. They are enriched for "broad" class promoters characteristic of housekeeping genes and associate with open chromatin proteins and Origin Recognition Complex (ORC) components. In two regions, 10A and 100B, coding sequences of genes whose 5'-ends reside in interbands map to constantly loosely compacted, early-replicating, so-called "grey" bands. Comparison of expression patterns of genes mapping to late-replicating dense bands vs genes whose promoter regions map to interbands shows that the former are generally tissue-specific, whereas the latter are represented by ubiquitously active genes. Analysis of RNA-seq data (modENCODE-FlyBase) indicates that transcripts from interband-mapping genes are present in most tissues and cell lines studied, across most developmental stages and upon various treatment conditions. We developed a special algorithm to computationally process protein localization data generated by the modENCODE project and show that Drosophila genome has about 5700 sites that demonstrate all the features shared by the interbands cytologically mapped to date.

Cloning and molecular genetic analysis of Drosophila melanogaster interband DNA

Interband DNA of Drosophila melanogaster polytene chromosomes was studied using a novel approach based on the electron microscopic (EM) analysis of chromosome regions carrying DNA fragments of known molecular genetic composition, inserted by P element-mediated transformation. Insertion of such fragments predominantly into interbands makes it possible to clone interband DNA by constructing genomic libraries from transformed strains and probing them with the insert DNA. The transformed strain P[H-sp70:Adh](61C) has insertion in the 61C7-8 interband on the left arm of chromosome 3. This DNA consists of part of the hsp70 gene promoter fused to the coding region of the Adh gene, and is flanked on either side by P element sequences. We constructed a genomic library from DNA of this strain and isolated a clone containing the insert and the interband DNA. Subsequently the genomic library of wild-type strain was probed with a subclone composed of interband DNA only. We have thus isolated a clone containing the entire native interband. 1289 bp of interband DNA was sequenced and found to be AT-rich (53.4%) with numerous regions of overlapping direct and inverted repeats, regulatory sites, and two overlapping open reading frames (ORFs).