Worm Breeder's Gazette 1(1): 14
These abstracts should not be cited in bibliographies. Material contained herein should be treated as personal communication and should be cited as such only with the consent of the author.
This group works on C. elegans for about two years. Our main interest is the development of this organism. We are serial sectioning eggs in various cleavage stages to trace the cell lineage. Completed so far: 1 egg, 2 two-cell stages, 1 four- cell stage, 1 bretzel-stage. An assembly line is being organized and hopefully the turnout will speed up. Nomarski studies on cleaving eggs supplement the EM studies. A detailed study of the ultrastructure of the cleavage furrow and the formation of cell membranes at early cleavage stages has been initiated. We are reconstructing 3-D pictures using a PDP 11/45 computer with a Vector General Graphics Display. Work has been started to accumulate a set of cleavage-deficient mutants for morphological analysis. In addition some preliminary experiments show that eggs can be opened by treatment with a variety of proteolytic enzymes. In this way suspensions of embryonal cells can be obtained. Ruth Pertel is spending 4 months as a guest in the lab to teach us axenic cultivation and replica plating. She also is interested in defining differences between the two strains of C. elegans Bristol N2 and NIH that have been kept separate for a number of years. Jerzy Nowak from Poland worked 4 months on proteolytic enzymes in cleavage stages. He also started using the O'Farrell technique (J.B.C. 250, 4007-4021, 1975) for high resolution two-dimensional electrophoresis of proteins from eggs and worms. Randy Cassada will join the group as a staff member starting December 1975.