University of Edinburgh, Queens Medical Research Institute

Drosophila hemocytes disperse over the entirety of the developing embryo. This protocol demonstrates how to mount and image these migrations using embryos with fluorescently labelled hemocytes.

Here we present a protocol for live-imaging wound repair and the associated inflammatory response at high spatio-temporal resolution in vivo. This method utilizes the pupal stage of Drosophila development to enable long-term imaging and tracking of specific cell populations over time and is compatible with efficient RNAi-mediated gene inactivation.