Developmental mechanism of Drosophila male accessory gland analogous to mammalian prostate

成年雄性果蝇的副腺类似于哺乳动物的前列腺，在精液中产生各种成分。目前已知有80多种肽能成分在雄性生殖策略中发挥重要作用，刺激雌性的各种生殖行为。副腺细胞表现出独特的细胞特征，所有上皮细胞都是双核细胞。我们证明，这种形态为细胞带来了细胞形状的灵活性，从而直接影响副腺腔的体积和精液的储存量（Taniguchi et al. 2012）。我们还证明了发育中的副腺的细胞周期在蛹期细胞质分裂跳跃前后异常同步，这是一个双核过程。此外，我们寻找产生双核细胞的原因。因此，一种以前未知的微管结合因子Mud/NuMA的剪接变体负责这种双核。

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.