Why is laser cell ablation not a viable procedure for Drosophila?
Drosophila have lots more cells, for one thing. Even more importantly, most of Drosophila development is regulative, rather than mosaic. What this means is that if you kill a cell or group of cells in Drosophila, neighboring cells will takeover and you will get no phenotype. It’s like a huge equivalence group. In C. elegans and other mosaic development animals, there is a fairly invariant cell lineage, so it’s like each cell has inherited cytoplasmic determinants that regulate its fate. Ablation of a cell will, in most cases, lead to loss of the function of that cell (unless there is an equivalence group, which is rare in mosaic animals).
