Identification and Analysis of a Gene with Potential to Repress the IMD pathway in Drosophila melanogaster

The IMD pathway is one of the signal transduction pathways that regulates innate immune responses in Drosophila. To understand the regulation mechanism of the IMD pathway, we performed a mis-expression screening and identified a gene, Dyro, which potentially repress the expression of the downstream target genes of the IMD pathway. We confirmed that Dyro was expressed in the fat body where the IMD pathway is functional and that the overexpression of Dyro increases susceptibility. However, we detected neither an increased expression of target genes nor reduced susceptibility in mutants. During the analysis, we observed that the Dyro mutant exhibits a female sterile phenotype, and observed oogenesis defects. The results suggest that Dyro have potential to suppress immune response but its main role is regulation of oogenesis.