Efficient high-throughput cuticle preparations from fly lines yielding both viable and unviable embryos

Analysis of Drosophila cuticular structures is a classic genetic tool to infer the efficiency of developmental processes via careful morphological evaluation. When performing genetic screens in pursuit of mutations with developmental effects or during mutational scanning to identify functionally important protein domains, high throughput analyses of cuticles from numerous fly lines becomes necessary. To increase throughput ingenious structures of fly containers have been devised such as fly “condominiums”, that allow separate housing of relatively small numbers of flies of different genotypes and parallel embryos collections