RNAi Screening

The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, is one of the famous model system used to understand various aspects of life. This is largely due to several reasons like its short life cycle, easy handling, fully sequenced genome and a wide array of available tools. These important genetics tools exploited are discussed in this book to unravel the biological mysteries of growth and metabolism. The evolutionary conserved insulin and nutrient signaling network is centered on TOR kinase. The TOR kinase and its substrate S6 kinase (S6K) orchestrate cell-autonomous and hormone-controlled growth and also controls the metabolism. The author beautifully describes a genome wide RNAi screen for novel regulators of steroidogenesis, lipid metabolism and dS6K-dependent growth. He presents a novel protein-protein interaction growth network in Drosophila and, through molecular data he shows that archipelago (ago), a component of an SCF-ubiquitin ligase known to regulate the degradation of dMyc, Cyclin E and Notch, regulates dS6K degradation. This book emphasizes the importance of the saturating screening strategies to identify novel regulators of the signaling pathways in Drosophila.