Coordination of wing and whole-body development at developmental milestones ensures robustness against environmental and physiological perturbations

Development produces correctly patterned tissues under a wide range of conditions that alter the rate of development in the whole body. We propose two hypotheses through which tissue patterning could be coordinated with whole-body development to generate this robustness. Our first hypothesis states that tissue patterning is tightly coordinated with whole-body development over time. The second hypothesis is that tissue patterning aligns at developmental milestones. To distinguish between our two hypotheses, we developed a staging scheme for the wing imaginal discs of Drosophila larvae using the expression of canonical patterning genes, linking our scheme to three whole-body developmental events: moulting, larval wandering and pupariation. We used our scheme to explore how the progression of pattern changes when developmental time is altered either by changing temperature or by altering the timing of hormone synthesis that drives developmental progression. We found the expression pattern in the wing disc always aligned at moulting and pupariation, indicating that these key developmental events represent milestones. Between these milestones, the progression of pattern showed greater variability in response to changes in temperature and alterations in physiology. Furthermore, our data showed that discs from wandering larvae showed greater variability in patterning stage. Thus for wing disc patterning, wandering does not appear to be a developmental milestone. Our findings reveal that tissue patterning remains robust against environmental and physiological perturbations by aligning at developmental milestones. Furthermore, our work provides an important glimpse into how the development of individual tissues is coordinated with the body as a whole.