Abstract
Drosophila epithelial research is at the forefront of the field; however, there are no well-characterized epithelial cell lines that could provide a complementary in vitro model for studies conducted in vivo. Here, a protocol is described that produces epithelial cell lines. The method uses genetic manipulation of oncogenes or tumor suppressors to induce embryonic primary culture cells to rapidly progress to permanent cell lines. It is, however, a general method and the type of cells that comprise a given line is not controlled experimentally. Indeed, only a small fraction of the lines produced are epithelial in character. For this reason, additional work needs to be done to develop a more robust epithelial cell-specific protocol. It is expected that Drosophila epithelial cell lines will have great utility for in vitro analysis of epithelial biology, particularly high-throughput analyses such as RNAi screens.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Litty Paul for the RNAi experiment. The work was supported by NIH R01GM071856 and an ARRA supplement NIH 3R01GM071856-04S1.
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Simcox, A. (2012). Progress Towards Drosophila Epithelial Cell Culture. In: Randell, S., Fulcher, M. (eds) Epithelial Cell Culture Protocols. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 945. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-62703-125-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-62703-125-7_1
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Publisher Name: Humana Press, Totowa, NJ
Print ISBN: 978-1-62703-124-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-62703-125-7
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