Worm Breeder's Gazette 10(2): 133
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.
Previously we have described our efforts to clone tubulin genes by direct screening of C. elegans expression libraries using nerve specific anti-tubulin antibodies(WBG 10, 1:59, 1987). For alpha- tubulin genes, 14 lambda gt11 clones were identified with a monoclonal antibody 3A5 (kindly given by M. Fuller), which is specific for alpha- tubulin and stains C. elegans neurons. Two of the 14 clones were subcloned in pUC 118, and sequenced by dideoxy method of Sanger and Coulson. One of these clones SQ#TbA77 (insert size 1.0 Kb) contained a DNA which is 79% homologous to the chicken alpha-tubulin DNA sequence; and its amino acid sequence deduced from DNA sequence is 88% homologous to the C-terminal region of the chicken alpha-tubulin. The second putative clone on sequencing revealed DNA that has no homology with tubulin DNA. Similarly, we have identified 15 lambda gt11 clones using E6B6, ( kind gift of T. Arai) a monoclonal antibody which is specific for alpha-tubulin and also stains C. elegans nervous system. Three of the 15 clones were subcloned and sequenced as stated above. One of these SQ#TbB03 has a sequence 76% homologous to the chicken tubulin DNA. We compared the nucleotide sequence of SQ#TbB03 with Nw#B8, the only other -tubulin cloned and sequenced in C. elegans (L. Gremke, Ph.D. Thesis,1987). The two nucleotide sequences and the deduced amino acid sequence is given below. It is quite remarkable that the two -tubulin genes have 100% homology at the level of amino acid sequence. Currently, we are trying to get the complete DNA sequence data of the tubulins identified by SQ#TbA77 and SQ#TbB03. [See Figure 1]