TaG-EM is a new approach to create barcoded fly strains (the barcode displayed is scannable and reads “DNA”). Image credit: Margaret Donovan (CC BY 4.0)
From delivery to shipping or shopping, barcodes are a part of everyday life. In biological research as well, ‘barcoding’ cells and organisms using specific DNA sequences has been a transformative approach. Such tags can be introduced into the genetic material of cells, allowing scientists to label cell populations or individuals of interest.
Here, Mendana et al. investigated how DNA barcoding could be used to cut down the time and cost required to pinpoint a certain population of cells, or of organisms, within a larger group. At present, such efforts often remain labor intensive and costly. For instance, it is now possible for researchers to capture all the genes that are switched on at any given time in individual cells in an organism; however, it is still difficult to then identify which tissue or population of interest a particular cell belongs to.
In response, Mendana et al. established a new approach in fruit flies, called TaG-EM, which makes it possible to bypass these limitations by introducing a carefully designed genetic barcode, easily read by DNA sequencers, into the genome of the fly. Further experiments also demonstrated that TaG-EM was valuable at the scale of an organism, to be used in behavioral experiments. Typically, researchers examine how various strains of animals respond to different conditions by testing each group separately; Mendana et al. were able to show that ‘barcoding’ the flies using TaG-EM made it possible to pool these behavioral measurements, as the different groups could then be later quickly identified using their genetic tags. Overall, this new approach should allow researchers using fruit flies to investigate questions around gene expression and behavior in a faster and cheaper way, improving our understanding of a range of biological processes.
