Post-transcriptional gene silencing has become the fastest and most frequently used approach to reduce gene function in cell culture. In an organism without an interferon response, such as Drosophila melanogaster, RNA interference (RNAi) can be evokedusing long, double-stranded RNAs (1). In order to achieve a gene knockdown at a stage not amenable to dsRNA injection into early embryos, trans-genie approaches have been used in Drosophila (2,3). Commonly, a 500 to 700 bp cDNA product is cloned as an inverted repeat with or without a spacer and expressed under the control of UAS-Gal4 sequences (4). To allow tissue-specific and/or temporally controlled expression of the RNAi transgene, the bimodular UAS-Gal4 system can be used, bypassing any potentialtoxicity of such transgenes.
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