Chemical selection of mutants that affect ADH activity in Drosophila. III. Effects of ethanol.

A chemical selection scheme is presented for the isolation of rare Adh-positive Drosophila. It makes use of the fact that flies lacking detectable ADH activity die as adults or larvae on relatively low concentrations of ethanol in the medium. We have demonstrated that this procedure is a practical one by crossing two Adh-negative alleles, screening 1.5 x 10(6) embryos, and isolating 14 Adh-positive survivors.