Drosophila gliogenesis during early embryogenesis

We report here the application of magnetic cell separation in microarray experiment to understand Drosophila gliogenesis during early embryogenesis. At stage 11, neuroectodermal cells were labeled by a fusion transmembrane protein, mCD8-GFP, in the wild-type embryos as wells as in the embryos where glide/gcm was overexpressed. Following the cell dissociation, neuroectodermal cells were purified by using the commercial available anti-mCD8 microbeads. Microarray experiments based on prepared neuroectodermal cells from wild-type embryos verse glide/gcm overexpressed embryos at stage 11 have revealed 76 gene differentially regulated by overexpression of glide/gcm. Among them, there are 11 genes have already been shown to be regulated by glide/gcm in the previous publications. Additionally, we have identified 4 more new glide/gcm-regulated genes by in situ hybridization or immunohistochemical staining. It is very convincing that reduction of the tissue complexity by cell purification leads to low false positives in microarray experiment. Keywords: other