TEMPORALLY MANIPULATED RESCUE OF VISUAL AND COURTSHIP ABNORMALITIES CAUSED BY A NONA MUTATION IN DROSOPHILA

The no-on-transient-A gene was identified by independently isolated mu tations causing visual-response abnormalities or courtship song defect s. The nonA(diss) mutant is abnormal for all of these phenotypes. The pleiotropic effects of this dissonance allele dovetail with the widesp read tissue expression of the nonA products. This gene, which encodes a putative RNA-binding protein, is expressed at essentially all stages of the life cycle. To determine whether the behavioral and physiologi cal abnormalities exhibited by nonA mutant adults have a developmental etiology or are the result of an impaired mature nervous (or perhaps neuro-muscular) system, a conditional form of this gene was constructe d. Animals from the resulting hsp-nonA(cDNA) transgenic strain were su bjected to heat-shock regimes such that the gene's coding sequences we re activated during development only, solely in the imaginal stage, or both. Surprisingly, expression during any of these time periods effec ted rescue of the visual-response and the courtship-song defects.