Figure 1.

Two approaches to the generation of pan-neuronal drivers leverage the cis-regulatory elements of a broadly expressed neural gene

(A) In a promoter fusion (left box), several kilobases of sequence in the promoter region of the target gene are fused to an effector or transcriptional activator and inserted at a distant (often random) location in the genome. Alternatively (right box), the effector or activator is inserted in-frame into the target locus preceded by a short linker that can be engineered to result in translation of separate target and reporter proteins from the same transcript (e.g., T2A “ribosomal skipping” sequence) or a fused protein (e.g., 3XGS linker).

(B) Expression of candidate neural target genes in the brain and a non-neural tissue of Ae. aegypti. Boxes show upper and lower quartiles, with whiskers extending to maximum and minimum (raw data from Matthews et al., 2016; n = 3–8 RNA-seq libraries per tissue). Abbreviations are as follows: nSyb, n-Synaptobrevin; Syt1, Synaptotagmin1; elav, embryonic lethal abnormal vision; brp, bruchpilot.