The Q System: A Repressible Binary System for Transgene Expression, Lineage Tracing and Mosaic Analysis

By Christopher Potter, Bosiljka Tasic, Emilie V Russler, Liang Liang, Liqun Luo. Cell, 2010

597 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary We describe a new repressible binary expression system based on the regulatory genes from the Neurospora qa gene cluster. This ‘Q system’ offers attractive features for transgene expression in Drosophila and mammalian cells: low basal expression in the absence of the transcriptional activator QF, high QF-induced expression, and QF repression by its repressor QS. Additionally, feeding flies quinic acid can relieve QS repression. The Q system offers many applications including: 1) intersectional ‘logic gates’ with the GAL4 system for manipulating transgene expression patterns, 2) GAL4-independent MARCM analysis, 3) coupled MARCM analysis to independently visualize and genetically manipulate siblings from any cell division. We demonstrate the utility of the Q system in determining cell division patterns of a neuronal lineage and gene function in cell growth and proliferation, and in dissecting neurons responsible for olfactory attraction. The Q system can be expanded to other uses in Drosophila, and to any organism conducive to transgenesis.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Genetics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cf46c46347077c240938154f473b4ab351606335

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Citations in the corpus

Genetic manipulation of genes and cells in the nervous system of the fruit fly (2011, methodology): “Toxicity was reported for QF when expressed at high levels (Potter et al., 2010).”
Generating Customized Transgene Landing Sites and Multi-Transgene Arrays in Drosophila Using phiC31 Integrase (2015, background): “For example, the expansion of available transactivation systems (Lai and Lee 2006; Luan et al. 2006; Potter et al. 2010) and recombinases (Nern et al. 2011) has spurred the development of increasingly sophisticated genetic techniques that require many transgenes, straining the current set of…”
Analysis of functional neuronal connectivity in the Drosophila brain. (2012, unknown): “The recent development of alternative binary expression systems, the LexA and Q systems (Lai and Lee 2006; Potter et al. 2010), now makes it possible to independently direct P2X2 and sensor expression within different neuronal classes.”
Non-Canonical Odor Coding in the Mosquito (2020, methodology): “See Data File 1 for a full description of all genotypes by figure) (Matthews et al., 2019; Potter et al., 2010; Riabinina et al., 2016).”
The neuronal architecture of the mushroom body provides a logic for associative learning (2014, methodology): “To generate QUAS-C3PA-GFP and QUAS-SPA-GFP, the C3PA-GFP and SPA-GFP coding sequences, flanked with EcoRI-CAAC (a Drosophila Kozak sequence) at the 5′-end and NotI at the 3′-end, were cloned into pQUAST (Potter et al., 2010).”
A pair of inhibitory neurons are required to sustain labile memory in the Drosophila mushroom body (2011, methodology): “The ChaGAL80 strain was as described in [11] and was provided by Ronald Davis (Scripps Florida); GH146QF, QUAS mCD8::GFP, and uas mCD8::mCherry were as described in [29, 33].”