Department of Biological Sciences, Department of Developmental Biology and Department of Genetics, Department of Biochemistry, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
Developmental Biology Program, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany.
Institute of Molecular Biology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA.
Stanford Genome Technology Center, 855ÊCalifornia Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94306, USA.
Department of Genetics, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
Molecular genetic studies of Drosophila melanogaster have led to profound advances in understanding the regulation of development. Here we report gene expression patterns for nearly one-third of all Drosophila genes during a complete time course of development. Mutations that eliminate eye or germline tissue were used to further analyze tissue-specific gene expression programs. These studies define major characteristics of the transcriptional programs that underlie the life cycle, compare development in males and females, and show that large-scale gene expression data collected from whole animals can be used to identify genes expressed in particular tissues and organs or genes involved in specific biological and biochemical processes.