As a facility that supports large-scale screens in Drosophila and other insect cell lines, we get excited about reports of new Drosophila cell lines and related info.

We'd like to highlight two recent papers.

One report, a collaboration between Amanda Simcox's group, the DGRC, and our group here at the DRSC, describes new cell lines made in Amanda's group and characterized in a collaboration of the three groups. Muscle cells that pulse? Yes. That and other exciting new cell lines are reported in the publication below, and the cells are available at the DGRC.

Coleman-Gosser, Hu, Raghuvanshi, Stitzinger et al. 2023 "Continuous muscle, glial, epithelial, neuronal, and hemocyte cell lines for Drosophila research"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10393297/

In the other paper, as part of a larger analysis of single-cell RNAseq data from Drosphila embryos, Deborah Andrew and colleagues use analysis of the data to shed new light on established cell lines. See in particular the sub-section titled "Transcriptome comparisons reveal that the majority of the embryonic cell lines are most similar to plasmatocytes."

Peng et al. 2024 "Organogenetic transcriptomes of the Drosophila embryo at single cell resolution"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10820837/

Relevant links within our site:
https://fgr.hms.harvard.edu/drosophila-cultured-cell-lines
https://fgr.hms.harvard.edu/crispr-modified-cell-lines