Maintenance of a <em>Drosophila melanogaster</em> Population Cage

Abstract

Large quantities of DNA, RNA, proteins and other cellular components are often required for biochemistry and molecular biology experiments. The short life cycle of Drosophila enables collection of large quantities of material from embryos, larvae, pupae and adult flies, in a synchronized way, at a low economic cost. A major strategy for propagating large numbers of flies is the use of a fly population cage. This useful and common tool in the Drososphila community is an efficient way to regularly produce milligrams to tens of grams of embryos, depending on uniformity of developmental stage desired. While a population cage can be time consuming to set up, maintaining a cage over months takes much less time and enables rapid collection of biological material in a short period. This paper describes a detailed and flexible protocol for the maintenance of a Drosophila melanogaster population cage, starting with 1.5 g of harvested material from the previous cycle.

The zinc-finger protein CLAMP promotes gypsy chromatin insulator function in Drosophila

“…Extracts from anterior thirds of larvae were used for western blotting. Embryos aged 0-24 h were collected from a population cage as described to produce nuclear extracts (Caravaca and Lei, 2016).…”

M1BP cooperates with CP190 to activate transcription at TAD borders and promote chromatin insulator activity

“…Co-immunoprecipitation. Embryonic nuclear extract was prepared from 20 g of mixed stage (0-24 h) Drosophila embryos 50 . Frozen embryos were ground in liquid nitrogen with mortar and pestle.…”

M1BP cooperates with CP190 to activate transcription at TAD borders and promote chromatin insulator activity

“…Protein extracts from anterior thirds of larvae were used for western blotting. Embryos aged 0–24 h were collected from a population cage reared at RT as described previously 52 to produce nuclear extracts.…”