Fig. 1: Detection of irradiation-induced apoptosis-resistant cells using a delayed reporter of Dronc activity.
a Representative WIDs from irradiated (20 Gy; X-rays) 3rd instar WT larvae immunostained to visualize dying apoptotic cells (cDcp-1; red). b Quantification of cell death in WIDs represented in (a) is expressed as the percentage of the WID area occupied by dying cells. c The graph depicts total size in square micrometers of the WIDs shown in (a). d, e Schematic representations of the Dronc activity genetic reporters RDBS and DDBS are shown before (upper) and after (lower) cleavage by Dronc. Created in BioRender. Braun, T. & Yacobi-Sharon, K. (2025) https://BioRender.com/s6ebqxl. f, g Irradiated WIDs expressing the RDBS (f, green) or the DDBS (g, green) were co-stained with TUNEL to detect dying cells (red). White boxes show magnifications of the outlined areas. h Quantification of co-labeling in the experiments shown in (f, g). Statistical tests: One-way ANOVA followed by Tukey’s multiple comparisons test (b, c); two-tailed unpaired Student’s t-test (h). All data points, including outliers, are displayed as box plots, with each point representing a single WID. Lower and upper whiskers represent the minimum and maximum values, respectively; the center line denotes the median; and the lower and upper box bounds correspond to the medians of the lower and upper halves of the dataset. Numbers (n) of WIDs examined were: 8 (4 hpi), 11 (24 hpi), and 12 (48 hpi) in (b); 9 (non-irradiated), 29 (4 hpi), 25 (24 hpi), and 23 (48 hpi) in (c); and 44 (RDBS) and 13 (DDBS) in (h) **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001; ****p < 0.0001; ns, not significant. p-values in (b): p = 0.0021 (4 hpi vs. 24 hpi), and p < 0.0001 (24 hpi vs. 48 hpi); (c): p = 0.0007 (non-irradiated vs. 4 hpi), p = 0.2483 (4 hpi vs. 24 hpi), p < 0.0001 (24 hpi vs. 48 hpi), p < 0.0001 (non-irradiated vs. 24 hpi), and p = 0.3309 (non-irradiated vs. 48 hpi); h: p < 0.0001 (RDBS vs. DDBS).
