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)
Included files: 021013b_An7_Lgl_7161_w_combined.tif 240913_Lgl7161An1w1_combined.tif 240913_Lgl7161An1w2_combined.tif 260913_7161_A1_w1_combined.tif 260913_7161_A2_w1_combined.tif 270913_An2_Lgl_7161_w_combined.tif