Identification of Mutational Loci in the Black Strip Mutant of Drosophila melanogaster

In this study we designed several pairs of primers to clone and sequence the ebony gene of a new pigment mutant named black strip (bsr) in Drosophila melanogaster (Qian & Zhang, 1994). Compared with ebony gene of wild type w91910 and ebony mutant of e1, there was no big deletion segment found in coding sequence of ebony of bsr except for several amino acid mutation sites which did not distribute in the key motif of ebony protein. However, a big fragment deletion was found at the 5′ end of ebony gene in bsr, which comprised 206 nucleotides of exon 1 and 747 nucleotides of intron 1. Therefore we have been able to accurately localize the mutation locus in bsr.