Worm Breeder's Gazette 10(3): 36
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.
The study of homeo box containing genes in nematodes has been approached by using the homeo boxes of the Drosophila genes fushi tarazu (ftz) and Antennapedia (Antp) as hybridization probes. From a genomic library of A. lumbricoides, several positive clones were isolated and one of them was further investigated. Sequence analyses revealed the existence of a 180bp lone Ascaris homeo box (AHB-1), located within a short, 243bp lone open reading frame. The AHB-1 encodes an amino acid sequence which is 78% homologous to the Drosophila Antp homeo domain. By using the Ascaris sequence AHB-1 as a probe, we succeeded in isolating two different homeo box containing clones from a C. elegans genomic library, kindly provided by Drs. S. Ward and K. Bennett. The sequence of one of them (CELHO) was analyzed and was shown to encode a polypeptide which is 57% homologous to the Drosophila Antp homeo domain. Neither the Ascaris nor the C. elegans homeobox contains an intron. Furthermore, the C. elegans homeobox was used as probe for screening the Ahringerer cDNA library of eggs. Three cDNA clones were picked. We are currently investigating the pattern of expression of these genes during development. [See Figure 1]