Stable Drosophila Cell Lines: An Alternative Approach to Exogenous Protein Expression

Recombinant protein production has become an indispensable tool for various research directions and biotechnological applications in the past decades. Among the numerous reported expression systems, insect cells provide the possibility to produce complex target proteins that require posttranslational modifications. Stable expression in Drosophila S2 cells represents an attractive alternative to the widely used baculovirus expression system, offering important advantages in particular for difficult-to-express proteins, e.g., membrane proteins or heavily glycosylated multi-domain proteins that are stabilized by a complex disulfide pattern. Here we present the methodology that is required for the generation of stable Drosophila S2 cell transfectants and for production of recombinant proteins using those transfectants.