Worm Breeder's Gazette 1(1): 21b

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.

Temperature Sensitive Lethals

B. Edgar

I too have been examining ts mutants.  I developed an enrichment 
method for their isolation.  Roughly synchronized F2 populations are 
grown at 21 C.  Slow developers are separated from normal developers 
by differential settling.  Of these slow developers up to 20% prove to 
be temperature sensitive mutants.  Seventy-three such mutants were 
isolated and partially characterized.  The major class (28) prove to 
be sensitive to high temperature at all stages of the life cycle (poop-
outs) and are presumed to affect general cell metabolism.  The rest 
could be classed as zyg (a block in embryogenesis), gon (steriles--
most appear defective in oogenesis, a few seem specifically defective 
in gonad development),zyg-gon (mutants with both of the above 
phenotypes) and sp (spermatogenesis defectives).  Of my zyg mutants 
most are zyg-gon.  Most show a maternal effect.  Reconstruction 
experiments show that the enrichment technique probably works mainly 
for the isolation of poop-outs.  Many mutants were isolated in a HIM-2 
background.  Unfortunately, HIM-2 (E1065) appears to be a temperature 
sensitive general non-disjunction mutant and produces 5% males and 
about 25% sterile eggs at 25 C.