Chapter 25 in vivo assessment of neuronal cell  death in drosophila

Abstract

Following neuronal cell death at the cellular level and over several time points is challenging in living animal because of the diffi culty of accessing and identifying individual neurons. In the eye of a living Drosophila, it is possible to visualize neurons thanks to the cornea neutraliz ation 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 effi cient for the study of photoreceptor development and degeneration. In this chapter, I describe this method and focus on fatp mutant photoreceptor neuron degeneration.