In a study published last week in Communications Biology, researchers from the University of Tsukuba describe a method to preserve Drosophila primordial germ cells (PGCs), which give rise to reproductive cells and may be used to produce Drosophila offspring when implanted into a host.
Drosophila are useful as a scientific model because their genome may be easily manipulated. However, when Drosophila populations are maintained by living culture over extended periods of time, unwanted genetic mutations may be inadvertently introduced into the genome. Until now, Drosophila strains have been preserved by freezing embryos, but these processes may be labor intensive and difficult to reproduce. Therefore, the team sought to develop a new technique for the preservation of Drosophila strains that is simple and reproducible.
“We treated PGCs from donor flies with a cryopreservation agent and stored them in liquid nitrogen, which maintains samples at an extremely low temperature,” explains senior author Satoru Kobayashi. “We found that cryopreserved PGCs that were thawed and transplanted into host flies were able to produce offspring with the same genetic characteristics as the donor flies.”
The researchers tested this technique using frozen PGCs from several Drosophila strains with different genetic backgrounds and found that offspring could be effectively produced from frozen PGCs regardless of strain. The cryopreserved PGCs were still effective after up to 400 days of long-term storage.
The researchers also transplanted frozen PGCs into a Drosophila strain that is normally unable to reproduce and found that the frozen cells were capable of inducing offspring from these hosts.