Fig. 2: Cytoneme behavior depends on the distance to the Ihog source.

a Ihog overexpression clones marked with different fluorophores. Blue arrows point to cytonemes stabilized towards areas without clones; red arrows point to touching clones showing no cytoneme stabilization when confronted; green arrows point to stabilized cytonemes crossing small clones (<2 cell diameters); <18% of the touching clones presented cytoneme stabilization (yellow arrows) for large clones (>2 cell diameters). b Cytoneme length (y-axis) versus distance between clones (x-axis) in μm. The red dotted line indicates the distances where the data cloud has a different behavior (<15 μm); the green dotted line represents the linear relation between the length of stabilized cytoneme and the distance between clones at short distances. c Statistical studies was performed using a Wilcoxon rank sum test per pairs over different regions (boxplots of 5 μm) showed a significant change of cytoneme behavior if the clones were closer than 15 μm. d We studied in detail cytonemes over the green dotted line (i.e., stabilized cytonemes which are longer than the distance with the closest clone) and we observed that those cytonemes able to stabilize show a change in their orientation (α) to avoid the confronted clones (α = 0 means no change in orientation and α = 90 a change towards opposite direction). Data were quantified along 235 cytonemes from different clones (n = 21). In box plots, a box indicates the median (in red) and 25 and 75 percentiles, whiskers indicate range of data and crosses indicate outliers. Raw data and p-values (ns:p > 0.05; *p ≤ 0.05; **p ≤ 0.01; ***p ≤ 0.001; ****p ≤ 0.0001) are provided as a Source data file. Scale bars: 15 μm.