Worm Breeder's Gazette 11(2): 62
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.
par-1 is a maternally expressed gene of C. elegans whose product is required during early embryogenesis. We previously reported that the YAC Y39H1 appears to span the par-1 locus. About one third of this 350 kb YAC is also covered in cosmid clones. We were unable to identify any useful Bristol-Bergerac polymorphisms with the cosmids between B0566 and D1086, and so took the alternative approach of searching the clones for sequences transcribed specifically during oogenesis. Poly(A)+ RNA was isolated from fem-2 and glp-1 animals and used to make radiolabelled cDNA probes. These were hybridized separately to duplicate Southern blots containing the cosmid and YAC clones. A 1kb EcoRI/HindIII fragment found in the overlap of cosmids C52G4 and T08G5 hybridized strongly to the fem-2 probe and very weakly to the glp-1 probe. This cosmid fragment identifies a 3.5 kb message on Northern blots which is approximately 20 fold more abundant in fem- 2 than in glp-1. Developmental Northerns show that the message is greatly enriched in adults, eggs, and early embryos relative to the amounts found in larvae. While these results suggest that the 1 kb fragment might contain part of the par-1 gene, the fragment did not identify any allele-associated RFLPs on Southern blots of nine par-1 alleles. A 1.1 kb partial cDNA clone was isolated from an early embryonic cDNA library made by Irene Schauer, and sequencing of this clone is in progress. We recently isolated a nearly full-length cDNA clone from Bob Barstead's library and we are using this clone to search for par-1 allele-associated polymorphisms.