Faint little ball
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| Epidermal growth factor receptor | |||||||
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| Identifiers | |||||||
| Organism | |||||||
| Symbol | Egfr | ||||||
| Alt. symbols | flb | ||||||
| UniProt | P04412 | ||||||
| |||||||
Faint little ball (flb) is a Drosophila gene that encodes the Drosophila epidermal growth factor receptor (DER) homolog.[1] The gene is also called torpedo and Ellipse.[2] The gene is located at 3-26 of the Drosophila melanogaster genome. It is named faint little ball because when the gene is mutated the embryo forms a ball of dorsal hypoderm.[3] flb is necessary for several processes to occur during embryonic development, specifically in central nervous system development. It is expressed as quickly as 4 hours after fertilization of the egg. The peak of expression of the flb gene is between 4–8 hours into development. In all processes that are facilitated by flb the same signal transduction pathway is used.[4] Drosophila EGF receptor is involved in the development of embryos as well as larvae/pupae's wings, eyes, legs and ovaries.[1]
Whether looking at development in embryos or larvae/pupae, DER relies on several ligands to carry out its function. These are called SPITZ, ARGOS and Gurken. The efficiency of DER corresponds with the sum of these three ligands. As of yet the exact purpose of these ligands in the pathway of DER is unknown, but when expression of these ligands is altered from normal, aberrant phenotypes of the embryos can be observed.[1] When DER is over utilized in the cell because of increases in ligand, phenotypic abnormalities can be visualized such as hyperplasia of the head midline structures.[5] The flb gene also has interactions with the proteins Rhomboid and Star. Rhomboid is a protease that cleaves ligands such as Spitz so that they can come into contact with receptors such as DER and begin activate a signal transduction pathway.
