Flow cytometry and karyotype analysis of D.melanogaster eye disc cells

The developing Drosophila eye-antennal disc is a particularly suited system for the genetic and cellular studies of complex biological processes. Methods to analyze Drosophila eye discs by flow cytometry are mainly based on the dissociation of tissues with trypsin. Dissociation operated by trypsin is very effective, though it causes a lot of stress to live cells often compromising the use of treated cells for further analyses. Here, we report a method to produce dissociated eye-disc cells that retain cell-membrane markers and that can be used for flow cytometry and cytological analysis of mitotic chromosomes. The method described is a great complementing tool for the cellular characterization of phenotypes resulting from classic clonal and miss-expression approaches in the Drosophila eye.