Worm Breeder's Gazette 1(1): 8
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.
As most people are probably aware by now, I first started by collecting a large number of temperature-sensitive mutants that are blocked in the reproductive life cycle. These mutants were then placed into six phenotypic categories. The zygote-defective mutants are those that lay fertilized eggs that fail to hatch. Gonadogenesis- defective mutants are those that when reared at restrictive temperature produce neither fertilized eggs nor progeny. Spermatogenesis mutants are those that when reared at restrictive temperature, can be rescued for progeny production by mating with wild type males at restrictive temperature. The accumulators are those that grow to an intermediate larval stage and either stop growing or die at an immature stage. The abnormal F1 are mutants that when placed at restrictive temperature grow up to be adults, produce progeny, but those progeny grow up to be sterile adults. In addition, a few temperature sensitive morphological mutants were isolated. Rebecca Vanderslice and I originally studied in greater detail three particular mutants in the zygote-defective category. They were interesting in two respects. (1) Not only did they show zygote- defective phenotype when the adults were placed in restrictive temperature, they also showed gonadogenesis-defective phenotype if they had been reared from L1 onward at high temperature. (2) Each of the three mutants is a maternal-effect mutant. At the present time, Becky Vanderslice and Bill Wood are re-examining the zygote-defective class and the gonadogenesis-defective class to find out which are and which are not maternal-effect mutants. One of the central questions we are asking is, what is the distribution of critical times of temperature sensitivity among the mutants and which of these are maternal effect mutants? We're asking how far into development do the mutants go with maternal contributions. At the same time, Tina Carlson, an undergraduate working in my laboratory, is working on the twenty-five spermatogenesis mutants to determine the critical times of temperature sensitivity and to begin characterizing them genetically in terms of linkage groups. Due to a recent conversation with Bob Edgar, we're worried about interallelic complementation and Tina is now doing mapping of these spermatogenesis mutants. Lastly, we are again involved in getting two-dimensional gels going. Pat O'Farrell, a graduate student working here, developed a very reliable two-dimensional gel electrophoresis system that probably most of you know about (it appeared in JBC this year). Michael Klass and Stephen Carr are now trying to improve the sensitivity so smaller amounts of radioactivity can be used. We hope soon to have a complete set of two-dimensional patterns for adult nematodes and different developmental stages.