nubbin, ventral veinless, and pdm3 play diverse roles in butterfly wing pattern development

Abstract

Butterfly wings present a tremendous gallery of colorful patterns, offering a unique opportunity to study how developmental pattern formation processes evolve. We still do not understand the genetic basis of several key aspects of wing pattern development, however. Three paralogous POU domain transcription factors nubbin, ventral veinless (vvl), and pdm3 are all known wing development genes in Drosophila melanogaster. Here we combine gene expression and knockout approaches to show that each of these genes plays multiple novel wing patterning roles in the common buckeye butterfly, Junonia coenia. We found that nubbin controls eyespot pattern determination via a non-cell autonomous repressor-like effect originating at the wing veins, such that nubbin knockouts have larger eyespots. nubbin also regulates pigment identity and scale morphology across the wing. We also found that vvl regulates pigment identity of the discal bands and ventral hindwing. Last, we found that pdm3 is required for determining the outer rings of eyespot patterns, where it is co-expressed with spalt and the lncRNA ivory. pdm3 is also necessary for determining wing margin stripes, where it is again co-expressed with spalt, leading us to propose that the eyespot and wing margin gene regulatory networks could be homologous. Together, our work shows that POU domain transcription factors play diverse roles in butterfly wing pattern development and highlights nubbin as one of the first genes implicated in the repressive function of wing veins in color pattern determination.