Figure 2. Comparison of Bicoid profiles in Drosophila embryos expressing Bicoid-GFP.

(Embryos were formaldehyde fixed during nuclear cycle 14 and imaged at the midsagittal plane via confocal microscopy.) (A) Embryo stained with GFP antibodies. (Scale bar is 100 mm.) (B) GFP autofluorescence for the same embryo as in (A). (C) Nuclear layer obtained via image analysis software used to extract gradients from (A) and (B) by sliding a circular averaging area (yellow circle) along the edge of the embryo images. (D) Extracted raw gradients from (A) and (B) projected on embryo AP axis. Dashed line corresponds to location of yellow circle in (C) from cut sections of (A; mean and SD across embryos). (E-H) Scatter plots of fluorescence intensities extracted from Bcd profiles for different embryos. All profiles were normalized by a background subtraction and a scale factor (see Experimental Procedures in Gregor et al., 2007a). Both dorsal and ventral profiles are shown in each panel. Colors represent individual embryos, red lines correspond to the average profile scatter, and error bars are for equal amounts of data points. Deviations of the compared profiles from the diagonal indicate a difference in the shape of the profile. For more information see Supplemental Data of Gregor et al. (2007a). Reproduced from Gregor et al. (2007a) with permission from Elsevier.