Worm Breeder's Gazette 11(1): 43
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.
I am continuing the molecular work on the unc-31 gene started by Roger Hoskins. Roger isolated a 17.5kb genomic clone in lambda2001 which he showed was capable of transformation rescue of unc-31 mutants. He also partially sequenced a 4.5kb fragment contained within this clone which covers some of the polymorphisms associated with mutant alleles of the gene. [See Figure 1] I have made subclones of this phage in lambda2001 and have used them in an attempt to narrow down the position of the gene by transformation rescue. A phage containing the 13.5kb XhoI fragment seems to rescue although this result has still to be confirmed. No rescue has been obtained with phage containing the 13.5kb SacI fragment or the 10.5kb SacI-XhoI fragment. I am currently sequencing the 13.5kb rescuing fragment. Several open reading frames have been found which could be spliced together inframe. Some of these have been confirmed by sequencing partial cDNA clones isolated from Julie Ahringers mixed stage cDNA library. The gene covers more than 8kb of genomic DNA. The 5' end is near or beyond the SacI site and the 3' end is beyond the end of the 4.5kb HindIII fragment. No homology has been found between predicted amino acid sequences and protein sequences present in the PIR and Swissprot databases.