Worm Breeder's Gazette 13(2): 28 (February 1, 1994)
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.
Chromatin diminution takes place in all presomatic cells of the early embryo of Ascaris lumbricoides. It includes developmentally regulated chromosome fragmentation, which is followed by the addition of many repeats of the telomeric sequence TTAGGC. Chromosomal breakage occurs within specific chromosomal regions (CBRs). One of these CBRs (CBR1) was analyzed in detail. A gene located close to CBR1 encodes a putative GTP-binding protein, whose promoter region is located within a distance of only 2 kb from the telomeric TTAGGC repeats of the corresponding somatic chromosome. This gene provided us with a good opportunity to check whether the newly formed somatic telomere during the process of chromatin diminution exerts a telomeric position effect, a phenomenon first discovered in Saccharomyces cervisiae. Preliminary Northern blot analyses, however, revealed that transcripts of this gene are present in all developmental stages, though the gene seems to be stronger expressed in oocytes and early embryos than in later developmental stages and somatic tissues. This suggests that the addition of the new telomere may not influence the transcription of this particular gene.