Description

The aly 5 strain is male sterile and belongs to the meiotic arrest mutants of the aly-class. The Drosophila always early (aly) gene coordinately regulates meiotic cell cycle progression and terminal differentiation during male gametogenesis. aly is required for transcription of key G2-M cell cycle control genes and of spermatid differentiation genes, and for maintenance of normal chromatin structure in primary spermatocytes. In its testes,  mature primary spermatocytes  arrest during differentiation, and show no signs of entering either the meiotic divisions or spermatid differentiation. However, meiotic arrest genes are not global regulators of the spermatid differentiation genes because several transcripts accumulate to normal levels in the primary spermatocytes of mutant testes; in order to determine whether the transcription of two novel male specific genes  isolated in our laboratoty, called mst36Fa and mst36Fb, depends on the same meiotic arrest genes, we used this mutant strain in our work.