How well do you know your mutation? Complex effects of genetic background on expressivity, complementation, and ordering of allelic effects
Fig 6
Cell proliferation in wing imaginal discs only partially recapitulates adult wing morphology and is not associated with background dependence.
Representative photographs depicting immunofluorescence staining for a marker of cell proliferation (red) and tissue size for ORE wild type (A) and ORE vg1 (B). Cell proliferation decreases with increasing allelic severity as expected for both sd (C) and vg (E), but does not reflect differences between genetic backgrounds in mutant expressivity. Thus, while the influence of individual mutations on cell proliferation correlates well with severity of phenotypic effects, it does not match expectations given the background specific consequences of adult wing morphology. However, background dependence is already observed in the wing imaginal disc as demonstrated by the spatial extent of WG expression (green) at the future wing margin for both sd (D) and vg (F) alleles. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.