Morphogen gradients provide essential spatial information during development. Not only the local concentration but also duration of morphogen exposure is critical for correct cell fate decisions. Yet, how and when cells temporally integrate signals from a morphogen remains unclear. Here, we use optogenetic manipulation to switch off Bicoid-dependent transcription in the early Drosophila embryo with high temporal resolution, allowing time-specific and reversible manipulation of morphogen signalling. We find that Bicoid transcriptional activity is dispensable for embryonic viability in the first hour after fertilization, but persistently required throughout the rest of the blastoderm stage. Short interruptions of Bicoid activity alter the most anterior cell fate decisions, while prolonged inactivation expands patterning defects from anterior to posterior. Such anterior susceptibility correlates with high reliance of anterior gap gene expression on Bicoid. Therefore, cell fates exposed to higher Bicoid concentration require input for longer duration, demonstrating a previously unknown aspect of Bicoid decoding.
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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/
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We thank Eric Wieschaus, Thomas Gregor, Johannes Jaeger, Tiffany Cook, Thomas Kaufman and
James Sharpe for sharing precious reagents. We acknowledge Eric Wieschaus, Enrique MartinBlanco, James Briscoe, Philip Ingham, Shelby Blythe and all Saunders’ lab members for fruitful discussions. This work was supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore under an NRF
Fellowship to TES (NRF2012NRF-NRFF001-094). National Research Foundation
Singapore - Timothy E Saunder. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or thedecision to submit the work for publication.