Main Content

Large scale fly culture

Size matters

  We are using nuclear extracts prepared from Drosophilia embryos as a starting material fort he purification of protein complexes. The picture shows the type of fly cage we are using.
One cage can accomodate between 25.000 and 50.000 flies. The carges are kept in an humidified, temperature-controlled room with an automated day-night cycle. We can maintain up to a half a million flies with relative ease. Half a million flies produce a lot of embryos: A three day embryo collection will typically yield 300-500 grams of material.

  Large scale fly cultures have successfully been used in the lab of Carl Wu, Jim Kadonga, Peter Verrijzer, Peter Becker and others to isolate a number of chromatin remodeling complexes. We have exploited the system to purify the first native Retinoblastoma tumor suppressor complex (Korenjak et al., Cell (2004)).