Behavioural Assessment of Muscle Development by Downregulating Different Types of Integrins in Drosophila melanogaster

Abstract

Muscles play a major role in movement and diverse activities required for survival of an organism. In Drosophila, larval crawling and peristalsis are such kinds of rhythmic movements and are driven by muscle contractions. Larval crawling involves random walk on the solid surface whereas peristalsis involves one full body wall muscle contraction from anterior to posterior or in reverse direction in fluid. Accuracy in the development of muscles is an important factor which helps the larvae to execute such rhythmic behaviour. Integrin, the evolutionary conserved heterodimeric transmembrane protein, assists in formation of stable and functional muscles. In Drosophila, larval crawling and peristalsis have been used as a phenotype to study the genetic and developmental aspects of muscles patterning, physiology and activity. These are complex movement events controlled by various other parameters such as efficient neuromuscular junctions (NMJ) and myotendinous junction (MTJ) system etc. The present study examined the effects of downregulation of different integrin genes in growing muscle fibres and tendon cells utilizing GAL4-UAS-RNAi lines. Changes in muscle functioning was assessed through larval crawling and peristalsis behaviour. Knockdown of integrins αPS1 and αPS2 led to slowdown in larval crawling and peristalsis while αPS3 and αPS4 did not show any such significant difference. βPS downregulation in tendon cells gave weaker phenotype than muscles whereas βν knockdown showed more pronounced phenotype when downregulated in tendon cells as compared to the muscles. Our results suggest novel and crucial role of βν during muscle development in Drosophila.

Keywords: Integrins, muscle development, Drosophila larvae, crawling and peristalsis

Cite this Article

Dubey M, Kumari R, Nanda KP, et al. Behavioural assessment of muscle development by downregulating different types of integrins in Drosophila melanogaster. Research & Reviews: A Journal of Life Sciences. 2018; 8(2):
55–63p.