Figure 1

The cell morphology and gene expression profiles of six Drosophila cell lines. (a) The three CNS-derived cell lines BG2-c2, BG3-c1 and BG3-c2 have a bipolar, spiky cell shape, whereas the three embryonic hemocyte-derived cell lines S2, S2R+ and Kc167 have a symmetrical morphology. Gene expression profiles for each cell line were normalized and hierarchical clustering was used to generate the dendrogram shown. This analysis reveals that cell lines from the same origin have closely related gene expression profiles (Table 1). (b) Kinase RNAi screens were carried out in all six cell lines. An RNAi library targeting 265 kinases and kinase regulatory subunits (Additional file 1) was combined with cells in 384-well plates and incubated for 5 days before fixing and staining to visualize F-actin, microtubules and DNA.