Figure 4

Coverage of maternal E. balteatus genes in comparison with transcriptome data from 0-2 hours old D. melanogaster embryos. (A) Scatter plot of orthologous genes for which we determined expression levels in E. balteatus (using 454 data from 0-0.5 hrs old embryos) and D. melanogaster (using RNAseq data from 0-2 hrs old embryos) on a log2 scale. The 14 previously identified E. balteatus genes are circled in red (if their D. melanogaster orthologues are known to have a maternal effect) or in blue (if their D. melanogaster orthologues are thought to lack a maternal effect). Asterisks demark genes that have been manually annotated. Genes not detected at the indicated developmental stage in one of the two species are plotted outside the scale (grey area). (B,C) Same as in (A) but limited to 15 identified genes encoding BMP signaling components (B) or 89 genes of gene specific transcription factors (C, list of genes based on flyTF, see Material and Methods). Genes that might lack significant maternal expression in one of the two species are indicated. Our analysis suggests that the zygotic D. melanogaster genes crossveinless-2, kekkon-5, doublesex, abdominal-A, vrille and Optix are expressed maternally in E. balteatus, while the maternal D. melanogaster transcription factor BEAF-32 may lack significant maternal expression in E. balteatus.