Transcriptional Enhancers inDrosophila

Key discoveries inDrosophilahave shaped our understanding of cellular "enhancers." With a special focus on the fly, this chapter surveys properties of these adaptablecis-regulatory elements, whose actions are critical for the complex spatial/temporal transcriptional regulation of gene expression in metazoa. The powerful combination of genetics, molecular biology, and genomics available inDrosophilahas provided an arena in which the developmental role of enhancers can be explored. Enhancers are characterized by diverse low- or high-throughput assays, which are challenging to interpret, as not all of these methods of identifying enhancers produce concordant results. As a model metazoan, the fly offers important advantages to comprehensive analysis of the central functions that enhancers play in gene expression, and their critical role in mediating the production of phenotypes from genotype and environmental inputs. A major challenge moving forward will be obtaining a quantitative understanding of how thesecis-regulatory elements operate in development and disease.