In vivo assessment of neuronal cell death in Drosophila

Following neuronal cell death at the cellular level and over several time points is challenging in living animal because of the difficulty of accessing and identifying individual neurons. In the eye of a living Drosophila, it is possible to visualize neurons thanks to the cornea neutralization technique. This technique can be coupled to the generation of mosaic clones by the Tomato /GFP -FLP/FRT method to identify a group of photoreceptor neurons at a single-cell resolution. This method has proved to be efficient for the study of photoreceptor development and degeneration. In this chapter, I describe this method and focus on fatp mutant photoreceptor neuron degeneration.