MONITORING DEVELOPMENT AND PATHOLOGY OF DROSOPHILA INDIRECT FLIGHT MUSCLES USING GREEN FLUORESCENT PROTEIN

We describe the use of a green fluorescent protein (GFP) reporter cons truct to monitor indirect flight muscle development in normal and muta nt Drosophila melanogaster strains. We used polymerase chain reaction to amplify a portion of the Act88F actin gene that includes 1420 nucle otides of flanking DNA, the transcription start, first intron, and ini tiator codon, incorporating the fragment into the Drosophila germ line transformation vector pCaSpeR. We fused the fragment to the gene enco ding green fluorescent protein of the bioluminescent jellyfish Aequore a victoria. We could detect GFP protein in transgenic strains and foun d that its accumulation, conveniently visualized in living flies using epifluorescence microscopy, was limited to the indirect flight muscle s. GFP fluorescence can be used to visualize all stages of flight musc le development subsequent to myoblast fusion and facilitates the detec tion of morphological changes in fibers caused by particular mutations . (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.