Immunohistochemical Analysis of Nuclear Lamina Structures in the Drosophila Ovary Using CRISPR-Tagged Genes

The Drosophila ovary represents an outstanding model for investigating tissue homeostasis. Females continuously produce oocytes throughout their lifetime. However, as females age, fecundity declines, in part, due to changes in ovarian niche function and germline stem cell (GSC) homeostasis. Understanding the dynamics of GSC maintenance will provide needed insights into how coordinated tissue homeostasis is lost during aging. Critical regulators of GSC maintenance are proteins that reside in the nuclear lamina (NL), including the NL proteins emerin and Barrier-to-Autointegration Factor (BAF). Continued investigation of how emerin, BAF, and other NL proteins contribute to GSC function depends upon the availability of antibodies for NL proteins, a limiting resource. In this chapter, we discuss strategies for using clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) genomic editing to produce endogenously tagged NL genes to circumvent this obstacle, using the generation of the gfp-baf allele as an example. We describe strategies for validation of tagged alleles. Finally, we outline methods for immunohistochemical analysis of resulting tagged-NL proteins.