An in vivo systematic genetic analysis of tumour progression in Drosophila - RNAi line: 7161

Metastasis is the leading cause of death for cancer patients. Consequently it is imperative that we improve our understanding of the molecular mechanisms that underlie progression of tumour growth towards malignancy. Advances in genome characterisation technologies have been very successful in identifying commonly mutated or misregulated genes in a variety of human cancers. A major challenge however is the translation of these findings to new biological insight due to the difficulty in evaluating whether these candidate genes drive tumour progression. Using the genetic amenability of Drosophila melanogaster we generated tumours with specific genotypes in the living animal and carried out a detailed systematic loss-of-function analysis to identify numerous conserved genes that enhance or suppress epithelial tumour progression. This enabled the discovery of functional cooperative regulators of invasion and the establishment of a network of conserved ‘invasion suppressors’. RNAi line: 7161 (III) Source: VDRC Name: Merlin Full name: Merlin Also known as: Mer, Dmerlin, D-Mer, BG01543 Annotation symbol: CG14228 FlyBase ID: FBgn0086384 File naming convention: File names typically contain representations of date (DDMMYY), RNAi Line, Animal Number and, in some cases, window (to accommodate larger samples that require multiple image stacks)