An Efficient Strategy for Generating Tissue-specific Binary Transcription Systems in Drosophila by Genome Editing

Binary transcription systems are powerful genetic tools widely used for visualizing and manipulating cell fate and gene expression in specific groups of cells or tissues in model organisms. These systems contain two components as separate transgenic lines. A driver line expresses a transcriptional activator under the control of tissue-specific promoters/enhancers, and a reporter/effector line harbors a target gene placed downstream to the binding site of the transcription activator. Animals harboring both components induce tissue-specific transactivation of a target gene expression. Precise spatiotemporal expression of the gene in targeted tissues is critical for unbiased interpretation of cell/gene activity. Therefore, developing a method for generating exclusive cell/tissue-specific driver lines is essential. Here we present a method to generate highly tissue-specific targeted expression system by employing a "Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat/CRISPR-associated" (CRISPR/Cas)-based genome editing technique. In this method, the endonuclease Cas9 is targeted by two chimeric guide RNAs (gRNA) to specific sites in the first coding exon of a gene in the Drosophila genome to create double-strand breaks (DSB). Subsequently, using an exogenous donor plasmid containing the transactivator sequence, the cell-autonomous repair machinery enables homology-directed repair (HDR) of the DSB, resulting in precise deletion and replacement of the exon with the transactivator sequence. The knocked-in transactivator is expressed exclusively in cells where the cis-regulatory elements of the replaced gene are functional. The detailed step-by-step protocol presented here for generating a binary transcriptional driver expressed in Drosophila fgf/branchless-producing epithelial/neuronal cells can be adopted for any gene- or tissue-specific expression.