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Hairless, also known as H, is a well-characterized
Drosophila ''Drosophila'' () is a genus of flies, belonging to the family Drosophilidae, whose members are often called "small fruit flies" or (less frequently) pomace flies, vinegar flies, or wine flies, a reference to the characteristic of many speci ...
gene In biology, the word gene (from , ; "... Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word gene to describe the Mendelian units of heredity..." meaning ''generation'' or ''birth'' or ''gender'') can have several different meanings. The Mendelian gene is a b ...
. Since Hairless is a dominant loss of function mutation, many mutations to Hairless are embryonic lethal, but there are several viable hairless mutants. This specific Drosophila gene is involved in the Notch signaling pathway (NSP) by acting as a suppressor of the organism's Notch signaling. This interaction of the NSP can be seen in Figure 1. Hairless (H) encodes a
hydrophilic A hydrophile is a molecule or other molecular entity that is attracted to water molecules and tends to be dissolved by water.Liddell, H.G. & Scott, R. (1940). ''A Greek-English Lexicon'' Oxford: Clarendon Press. In contrast, hydrophobes are ...
protein that is composed of 1076 amino acids, and has a molecular weight of 110 kDa. The H protein is reported in insects, and is found in nearly all of the family
Drosophilidae The Drosophilidae are a diverse, cosmopolitan family of flies, which includes species called fruit flies, although they are more accurately referred to as vinegar or pomace flies. Another distantly related family of flies, Tephritidae, are true ...
. It is also found in the family
Culicidae Mosquitoes (or mosquitos) are members of a group of almost 3,600 species of small flies within the family Culicidae (from the Latin ''culex'' meaning "gnat"). The word "mosquito" (formed by ''mosca'' and diminutive ''-ito'') is Spanish for "litt ...
, as well as the orders Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera, and Coleoptera. In ''Drosophila'', NSPs allow for communication intercellularly during embryo development, and the physiological activities of adult organisms. Furthermore, these pathways turn on periodically during devolvement to help determine cell fate functions of the cell. Since Hairless (H) is an antagonist of the NSP, as well as a “key member of the Su repressor complex", it plays a significant part of embryo development in insects because it helps influence cell fate decisions during this time. It is crucial that proteins HP120 and HP150 are present in the organism as they control the normal activity of H. This activity regulation also controls NSP, which allows the fly embryos to develop correctly, and if there is any fluctuation in the pathway or the proteins, it can change the outcome of the offspring. The two most common changes in the Drosophila phenotype as a result of Hairless mutation are bristle loss and vein gaps. These changes can be seen in Figure 2.


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External links


Society for Developmental Biology: Hairless

Kegg Pathway highlighting Hairless
Drosophila melanogaster genes {{cell-biology-stub