Zelda's Link

Life is a perilous quest, for humans as well as the fruit flies (Drosophila) that share many of our genes. After injury, our tissues must heal quickly, but then switch off this accelerated growth or risk cancers forming – but how? Here researchers investigate how a protein called Zelda, a transcription factor with the power to switch fly genes ‘on’ or ‘off’, affects the healing of damaged parts of drosophila wings. In undamaged wings (left column), blocking Zelda has little effect on the wings’ healthy patterns (bottom compared to top). But interrupting Zelda in healing wings (bottom middle and right) leaves them overgrown, losing their patterns. Zelda could be the key to the return to peace after the drama of healing. And searching for Zelda (named, of course, after a famous princess) or similar proteins in human cells, might provide clues to our return to questing, after we recover full health.

Written by John Ankers

• Image from work by Anish Bose and colleagues
• Cell and Developmental Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
• Published in Science Advances, June 2025