Number of Bicoid mRNAs in wild-type females

Value 7.5e+5 bcd mRNAs/embryo Range: ±0.8e+5 bcd mRNAs/embryo
Organism Fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster
Reference Petkova MD, Little SC, Liu F, Gregor T. Maternal origins of developmental reproducibility. Curr Biol. 2014 Jun 2 24(11):1283-8. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2014.04.028. p.1284 right column bottom paragraph & p.1286 right column 2nd paragraphPubMed ID24856210
Method P.1283 right column 3rd paragraph: "To optically identify individual mRNA molecules in whole-mount embryos and to assess embryo-to-embryo reproducibility, [investigators] extended a recently developed mRNA labeling method of fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) [refs 18, 20]. [They] labeled bcd mRNAs with synthetic probes and then counted individual molecules and measured their fluorescence intensity by confocal microscopy (Figure 1, Figure S1 available online)."
Comments p.1284 right column bottom paragraph: "To assign a value for [their] overall estimate, [researchers] averaged the three independent measurements, yielding M(bcd)=(7.5±0.8)×10^5 (SEM). The consistency among the three measures validates the FISH-based counting method in assessing embryo-to embryo bcd mRNA count reproducibility." P.1286 right column 2nd paragraph: "Thus, with M(bcd)=(7.5±0.8)×10^5 mRNA molecules, [researchers] calculated a translation rate of k≈2 proteins per mRNA per minute, which matches previously reported translation rates during the development of sea urchin embryos [ref 30, Bolouri & Davidson 2003 PMID 12883007]."
Entered by Uri M
ID 111202