Isolating DNA Repair Mutants of Drosophila melanogaster

The fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster offers numerous advantages as a metazoan model for genetic dissection of conserved biological processes, such as DNA repair. Its ease of culture, short generation time, small number of linkage groups (2n=8), and giant polytene chromosomes, combined with a wealth of morphological mutants and chromosomal variants (1 ) accumulated over 90 years and now cataloged in FlyBase (http://flybase.bio.indiana.edu or http://www.ebi.ac.uk/flybase/ ), make it a powerful and versatile system for genetic analysis (2 ). D. melanogaster also has emerged as one of the best multicellular eukaryotes in which to disrupt genes by transposon mutagenesis for the purpose of molecular cloning (3 –5 ), and to study cloned gene functions by transformation (6 ). Cytological studies of flies also have reached new levels of sophistication in keeping with recent advances in microscopy, probe technology, and electronic imaging (7 ,8 ).