Comparison of testis transcriptome changes resulting from mutations in dany and representative meiotic arrest genes

The Drosophila gene dany is expressed specifically in spermatocytes and encodes a nuclear protein with similarity to the products of the genes distal antenna (dan) and distal antenna-related (danr). Loss of dany function results in male sterility. Mutant spermatocytes fail to differentiate similar as previously observed in mutants lacking tTAF and tMAC function. Microarray analyses were performed to characterize the effects of loss of dany function on gene expression in testis and for a comparison of the effects with those caused by mutations in the tTAF gene spermatocyte arrest (sa) and the tMAC genes always early (aly) and matotopetli (topi) RNA was isolated after testis dissection from adult males and used for the production of probes for microarray hybridization. Five different genotypes were used for testis dissection: control, dany mutant, sa mutant, aly mutant, topi mutant. The number of biological replicates per genotypes was between two and four.