Developmental mechanism of Drosophila male accessory gland analogous to mammalian prostate

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The accessory gland of adult male Drosophila is analogous to the mammalian prostate which produces various components in the seminal fluid. More than 80 kinds of peptidergic components are known to be important for male reproductive strategy in stimulation of various female reproductive behaviors. The accessory gland cells show a unique cellular feature in which all of the epithelial cells are binucleate cells. We demonstrated that this morphology brings a cell shape flexibility to cells to directly affect the volume of the accessory gland cavity and the storage amount of seminal fluid (Taniguchi et al. 2012). We also demonstrated that the cell cycle in the developing accessory gland was unusually synchronized around cytokinesis skipping in the pupal stage, a process of binucleation. Furthermore, we sought causal factor(s) to create binucleate cells. As a result, a previously unknown splicing variant of a microtubule–binding factor Mud/NuMA was responsible for this binucleation.