Spatiotemporal gene expression: Difference between revisions

Spatiotemporal gene expression refers to the activation of genes within specific tissues of an organism at specific times during development. The spatial and temporal restriction of gene expression is fundamentally required generate the diversity of cell-types found in developed organisms; since the identity of a cell is specified by the pattern of gene expression within that cell, if gene expression was uniform spatially and temporally, there could be at most one kind of cell.

Consider the gene wingless, a member of the wnt family of genes. In the model organism Drosophila melanogaster, wingless is expressed in the embryo in alternating stripes three cells separated.

• [1] FlyBase report of wg expression in fruit flies