The ‘DrosDel immunity’ panel is set of Drosophila lines useful to study the immune system generated by the Luis Teixeira and Bruno Lemaitre labs (notably, also Mark Hanson for effector mutants) and deposited at Vienna Drosophila Resource Center. Mutations in these flies were introgressed by successive backcrosses in the DrosDel background using the scheme described in Ferreira et al.(1) , or sometimes directly generated in the DrosDel background by CRISPR/Cas9. This panel includes flies lacking functional Toll (spz[rm7]) or Imd (Rel[E20]) pathways. PPO1,PPO2 flies with no melanization, NimC1, Eater flies deficient for phagocytosis and hemocyte sessility, as well as flies lacking various immune effectors (Bomanins, Transferrin 1, antimicrobial peptides…). Flies lacking 14 AMPs genes, or lacking non-overlapping subsets of these 14 AMPs (group A, B, C) as well as group D flies (Daisho and Baramicin A) can be conveniently used to identify an AMP involved in a process (See ref (2)).
While these isogenized lines can be useful to study the immune response in a rather controlled background, we recommend using alternative methods to confirm the results (rescue, RNAi, analysing the mutations over a deficiency, or analysing the same or another mutation in another background). We cannot exclude that significant portions of the genome are not well isogenized (notably in close proximity to the mutation of interest), or that resulting phenotypes come from complex interactions between the mutation and second site mutation of the DrosDel background — not to mention varying status of white and white+ rescue, GFP, DsRed, etc… We hope to expand this collection of immunity fly strains.
