Worm Breeder's Gazette 12(5): 76 (February 1, 1993)
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.
As part of the genome sequencing project two cDNAs cm01 c10 and cm18 e3 were partially sequenced and found to be homologous to the proto-oncogene pim-1 (Nature Genetics 1992;1:114-1 23). Pim-1 encodes a serine/threonine protein kinase and is expressed in mammalian cells of hematolymphoid and germ cell lineages. We have sequenced the cDNA and genomic clones except for a relatively large intron in prk-1 ( cmO1 c10 )indicated in fig 1 by a broken line. Neither cDNA was full length and the predicted open reading frames at the 5' end of each gene have been included in fig 1 and 2. We will try to confirm that these sequences are correct by cloning these regions using PCR procedures on cDNA. The expected amino acid sequence of both genes is very homologous (60% similarity and 40% identity) to murine pim-1 .These results are shown in fig 2; the amino acids shared by the C. elegans and mouse genes are underlined. Both C. elegans genes are much longer at the 3' end than the mouse gene and in addition there are two genes in C. elegans whereas to date only one has been identified in the mouse.
The possible involvement of pim-l in cellular growth and/or differentiation makes it likely that these genes play an important role in the biology of the nematode. Mutations in these genes will be studied in order to determine their normal function. Tc1 insertions mutants have been isolated from the frozen mutant bank; their position has been indicated in figure 1 (Plasterk WBG Oct 1992). These insertions will be used as starting points to obtain deletion mutants (see Broeks et al this issue).