Worm Breeder's Gazette 11(5): 56
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.
By doing Bal 31 digestion experiments, we have shown that about 4 to 9 kb of the simple repeated sequence TTAGGC are located at the end of the C. elegans chromosomes. This sequence, also present at the A. lumbricoides telomeres (WBG: this issue), shows similarities to the telomeric sequences found in all organisms analyzed so far, including some lower eukaryotes, plants and vertebrates. In order to develop an efficient strategy to clone C. elegans telomeres, we have constructed a YAC (yeast artificial chromosome), carrying an Ascaris telomere at one end. Upon transformation, we could show that the sequence TTAGGC functions as telomere in yeast, which adds its own telomeric sequences to it. We conclude, therefore, that cloning of C. elegans telomeres can be done by complementation of a deficient YAC vector. Besides the fact that telomeres are specialized structures important for chromosome stability, the particular significance of cloned C. elegans telomeres is that they will contribute to achieve the physical mapping of chromosomes and that they provide one set of elements for the construction of artificial C. elegans chromosomes.