Cell
Volume 52, Issue 2, 29 January 1988, Pages 269-279
Journal home page for Cell

Article
The Toll gene of drosophila, required for dorsal-ventral embryonic polarity, appears to encode a transmembrane protein

https://doi.org/10.1016/0092-8674(88)90516-8Get rights and content

Abstract

The Toll gene of Drosophila, a maternal effect gene that plays a central role in the establishment of the embryonic dorsal-ventral pattern, has been cloned using P element tagging. A 5.3 kb poly(A)+ ovarian transcript from the cloned region was purified by hybrid selection with the cloned DNA. This purified transcript complements the Toll mutant phenotype when injected into Toll embryos, which proves that it is the Toll transcript. The sequence of cDNAs suggests that the Toll protein is an integral membrane protein with a cytoplasmic domain and a large extracytoplasmic domain. The putative extracytoplasmic domain contains at least 15 repeats of a 24 amino acid, leucinerich sequence found in both human and yeast membrane proteins.

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