Worm Breeder's Gazette 10(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.
We generated recombinant inbred (RI) lines of the worm to answer questions regarding the genetic specification of life span in wild populations. RI lines in both Neurospora and mice are being used to map genes based solely on differences in RFLP's between the parental strains used to generate the RI lines. The lines we generated were derived from Bristol/Bergerac F1 self crosses and so are segregating the several hundred RFLP's that result from Tc1 insertions as well as many others. Any visible single-gene difference segregating in the RI lines can be scored to generate a strain distribution pattern (SDP) for that marker. If a second unmapped gene has a similar SDP, that gene must be near to the previously mapped gene. It has been obvious for some time that the generation of a linkage map based on the SDP's of many RFLP's would be possible, albeit a bit tedious to construct. Such a map might be useful to us in mapping genes specifying life history traits that are segregating in the Bristol/Bergerac background; but the RFIP map might also be useful as a general mapping strategy. Once the RFLP map was well developed one could reveal linkage to within 1 map unit, on the average, by simply probing the 43 RI strains with the clone of interest; these analyses could be carried out on the same set of blots time after time. RFLP's from different contigs could be used to map contigs onto the map relative to each other and relative to mapped RFLP's even if some regions of overlap remain unclonable using yeast cloning vectors. Hi-Recombination Inbred lines could be generated that would allow fine structure mapping to the finest resolution of available RFLP's without necessitating the scoring of more than 25 to 50 strains. The major problem with this idea is that it might be more worm than it's worth at the current time. Nevertheless, I'd appreciate help from the worm community in sending me any information which you may have collected on RFLP's, mapped or unmapped, or any other single-gene trait that is known to differ between Bristol and Bergerac and thus should be segregating in the RI strains.