Chapter 5 Principles of Drosophila Eye Differentiation

The Drosophila eye is one of nature's most beautiful structures and one of its most useful. It has emerged as a favored model for understanding the processes that direct cell fate specification, patterning, and morphogenesis. Though composed of thousands of cells, each fly eye is a simple repeating pattern of perhaps a dozen cell types arranged in a hexagonal array that optimizes coverage of the visual field. This simple structure combined with powerful genetic tools make the fly eye an ideal model to explore the relationships between local cell fate specification and global tissue patterning. In this chapter, I discuss the basic principles that have emerged from three decades of close study. We now understand at a useful level some of the basic principles of cell fate selection and the importance of local cell-cell communication. We understand less of the processes by which signaling combines with morphogenesis and basic cell biology to create a correctly patterned neuroepithelium. Progress is being made on these fundamental issues, and in this chapter I discuss some of the principles that are beginning to emerge.