α-Spectrin and integrins act together to regulate actomyosin and columnarization, and to maintain a monolayered follicular epithelium.

The spectrin cytoskeleton crosslinks actin to the membrane, and although it has been greatly studied in erythrocytes, much is unknown about its function in epithelia. We have studied the role of spectrins during epithelia morphogenesis using the Drosophila follicular epithelium (FE). As previously described, we show that α-Spectrin and β-Spectrin are essential to maintain a monolayered FE, but, contrary to previous work, spectrins are not required to control proliferation.

The auto-inhibitory domain and ATP-independent microtubule-binding region of Kinesin heavy chain are major functional domains for transport in the Drosophila germline.

The major motor Kinesin-1 provides a key pathway for cell polarization through intracellular transport. Little is known about how Kinesin works in complex cellular surroundings. Several cargos associate with Kinesin via Kinesin light chain (KLC).

Polo-mediated phosphorylation of Maelstrom regulates oocyte determination during oogenesis in Drosophila.

In Drosophila, Maelstrom is a conserved component of the perinuclear nuage, a germline-unique structure that appears to serve as a site for Piwi-interacting RNA (piRNA) production to repress deleterious transposons. Maelstrom also functions in the nucleus as a transcriptional regulator to repress the expression of microRNA-7, a process that is essential for the proper differentiation of germline stem cells. In this paper, we report another function of Maelstrom in regulating oocyte determination independently of its transposon silencing and germline stem cell differentiation activities.