Live Imaging of Border Cell Migration in Drosophila

Border cells are a cluster of cells that migrate from the anterior tip of the Drosophila egg chamber to the border of the oocyte in stage 9. They serve as a useful model to study collective cell migration in a native tissue environment. Here we describe a protocol for preparing ex vivo egg chamber cultures from transgenic flies expressing fluorescent proteins in the border cells, and using confocal microscopy to take a multi-positional time-lapse movie. We include an image analysis method for tracking border cell cluster dynamics as well as tracking individual cell movements.