Autonomy of the wingless mutation in Drosophila melanogaster

Summary T(Y;2) translocations were used to cytologically localise the wingless locus of Drosophila melanogaster. We found that an existing T(Y;2), which is an insertion of a segment of 2L into the Y chromosome, has wg⁺ within this insert. This Y chromosome was used to generate an attached XY chromosome containing wg⁺. The mutation claret-nondisjunctional (ca^nd) was used to induce the loss of this XY chromosome and thus generate gynandromorphs with wg¹/wg¹ male tissue and wg⁺/wg¹/wg¹ female tissue. Analysis of these gynanders demonstrated that a genotypically wingless mutant hemithorax is usually also phenotypically mutant in these half body mosaics; thus wg¹ is discautonomous. This observation is of interest as it is known that wg is not cell autonomous.