Figure 2.

Sex Differences in Intestinal Sugar Gene Expression Are Independent of Gut Cell Sex

(A) Heatmaps displaying normalized expression abundance for sugar genes with transformer (tra)-dependent sexually dimorphic expression in adult midgut of females, males, and whole-body tra null mutant “females” (in Table S1 are genes and expression abundance).

(B and C) RT-qPCR expression data for a subset of sugar genes with midgut-specific expression (Leader et al., 2018) (gene names at bottom of graphs) in male (M) and female (F) control flies, flies with whole-body tra knockout (tra^KO) or flies with whole-body tra^F knockin gain-of-function (tra^{F K-IN}) (B) and flies harboring a whole-body tra2 null mutation (C). In these and subsequent graphs, expression abundance for each gene was arbitrarily set at 100% for control males, and the percentage of that expression is displayed for the other sex and genotypes.

(D–F) RT-qPCR expression data for the same set of sugar genes in flies in which tra was downregulated (D) (escargot, midgut expression 1 [esg, mex1] > tra^RNAi), knocked out (E) (esg, mex1 > flp,tra^F) or re-introduced (F) in a tra whole-body mutant (tra^KO, esg, mex1 > tra^F) in intestinal progenitors and ECs in relation to controls.

In all images, n = number of fly groups analyzed per genotype (each group, 20 flies). Asterisks highlighting significant comparisons across sexes are displayed in gray boxes at bottom of graphs.

See Table S4 for a list of full genotypes. See also Figures S2 and S3 and Table S1.