Friday, October 9, 2015

DGRC team reports on targeted insertion approach to modifying Drosophila cultured cell lines

Lucy Cherbas, Jennifer Hackney, Lei Gong, Claire Salzer, Eric Mauser, Dayu Zhang and Peter Cherbas. 2015. Tools for Targeted Genome Engineering of Established Drosophila Cell Lines. Early online at Genetics.

From the abstract: "We describe an adaptation of φC31 integrase-mediated targeted cassette exchange for use in Drosophila cell lines. ... We demonstrated the technology by integrating a cassette containing a Cu++-inducible mCherry marker, and we report the expression properties of those lines. When compared with clonal lines made by traditional transformation methods, which lead to the illegitimate insertion of tandem arrays, targeted insertion lines give more uniform expression, lower basal expression and higher induction ratios. Targeted substitution, though intricate, affords results that should greatly improve comparative expression assays – a major emphasis of cell-based studies."

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