Fig. 4.

Impact of ectopic Nanos expression on germ cell differentiation. (A) Phenotypic impact of ectopic Nanos expression driven by two copies of the nanos-myc^ALL transgene is more pronounced in a bam^Δ86/+ background. Confocal images of ovaries from 3-d-old animals stained for Vasa (red) to mark germ cells and 1B1 (green) to label the germ cell–specific spectrosomes and fusomes. 1B1 also labels somatic cell membranes. Scale bars = 25 μm. (B) Average number of spectrosomes/fusomes per germarium in different genetic backgrounds scored 3 and 20 d after eclosion. Spectrosomes/fusomes were classified as Round (R, spherical and not protruding into other cells), Short (S, extends to one adjacent cell), or Long (L, branches into two or more adjacent cells). Error bars represent SDs (n = 20 for each genotype/age group). Asterisks indicate significant differences by Student t test (***P < 0.001). (C) Relative distribution of the different types of spectrosome/fusomes structures per germarium. Asterisks indicate significant differences by the χ² test (*P < 0.05, ***P < 0.001).