Cherbas Lab
Research:
A glance at the DGRC web site will provide a good picture of the range of Drosophila cell lines now available. While enough experiments have been done to document the diversity of these lines (e.g. our microarray results) most lines have never been studied in any detail.
For some of our protocols for working with and transforming Drosophila cells, go to DGRC/Cells.
A current project is to develop tools for regulating expression of exogenous genes in these cells. For example, we need controlled expression of the RNAi constructs we plan to use to perturb the ecdysone response. Regulated vectors exist based on the metallothionein and heat shock promoters or based on hormonal or tetracycline control. But all of these systems -- as currently realized -- have drawbacks when the experiment will end in microarray analysis. We require a system that is not at all leaky (to avoid selecting cell lines that adjusted to low level RNAi expression) and that does not otherwise perturb gene expression. We hope to develop tools of general applicability.
