AUTONOMY OF THE WINGLESS MUTATION IN DROSOPHILA-MELANOGASTER

T(Y;2) translocations were used to cytologically localise the wingless locus of Drosophila melanogaster. We found that an existing T(Y;2), which is an insertion of a segment of 2L into the Y chromosome, has wg+ within this insert. This Y chromosome was used to generate an attached XY Chromosome containing wg+. The mutation claret-nondisjunctional (cand) was used to induce the loss of this XY chromosome and thus generate gynandromorphs with wg1/wg1 male tissue and wg+/wg1/wg1 female tissue. Analysis of these gynanders demonstrated that a genotypically wingless mutant hemithorax is usually also phenotypically mutant in these half body mosaics; thus wg1 is disc-autonomous. This observation is of interest as it is known that wg is not cell autonomous.