Fig. 6

Peptidergic rk-expressing neurons participate in the control of melanization. a Abdominal pigmentation in 3-h- (upper panel) and 48-h-old (lower panel) female flies expressing tBur in: bursicon neurons using CCAP-GAL4 (which drives expression in all bursicon neurons from the VNS [10]) and burs-GAL4 (which drives expression in all bursicon neurons [11]); and in peptidergic neurons using the dimm-GAL4 driver and restricted to non-CCAP neurons using CCAP-GAL80. b Abdominal pigmentation in 3-h- (upper panel) and 48-h-old (lower panel) female flies expressing tBur under the control of peptidergic neuron drivers (dimm-GAL4 and amon-GAL4) and restricted to VNS using tsh-GAL80. c Abdominal pigmentation in 3-h- (upper panel) and 48-h-old (lower panel) female flies expressing tBur in ILP7 neurons using ilp7-GAL4; in ilp7 null mutants; and in flies (multiply) mutant for ilp2, ilp3, ilp5, and ilp7. Genotypes are coded as described in Fig. 1b; boxes indicate the first and third quartiles, thick central lines mark the medians, and whiskers represent data range. Red dashed lines indicate the median pigmentation level when tBur is expressed ubiquitously (rk>tBur). n = 10 in each group. Results for each age were compared using a one-way ANOVA followed by a Tukey HSD post hoc analysis. Different letters indicate statistically significant differences (p values ≤ 0.02 for a; p ≤ 0.01 for b and p ≤ 0.0001 for c). Results for males are presented in Additional file 1: Figure S8