MiMIC and RMCE

Several thousand MiMIC insertions within introns of genes have been generated across the Drosophila genome (Venken et al., 2011). These insertions contain inverted attP sites and allow replacement with virtually any sequence a researcher desires. Most commonly, MiMIC insertions represent strong loss-of function alleles by virtue of the presence of a strong splice acceptor signal followed by translational stop signals in all three reading frames. Replacement by Recombination Mediated Cassette Exchange (RMCE) allows efficient tagging of the target protein with any epitope (i.e., FLAG, HA, Myc, GFP, etc.). In addition, it is also possible to use MiMIC alleles to introduce point mutations in the target gene and therefore conduct high-resolution structure-function or gene regulation studies by direct modification of the endogenous locus (Weng et al., 2009).

A large number of plasmids are available in all three reading frames for injection into MiMIC stocks. These can be purchased from the DGRC and sent to GenetiVision for injection. A list of these plasmids can be found at http://flypush.imgen.bcm.tmc.edu/pscreen/construct.html.