Worm Breeder's Gazette 13(2): 33 (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.
The synthetic Multivulva (synMuv) genes act in the determination of vulval cell fates. These genes are defined by the production of a synthetic Multivulva phenotype in certain double mutant combinations. Single mutants are wild-type with respect to vulval development. Mutants fall into two classes, A or B. Any double mutant carrying both a class A and a class B mutation is Multivulva. Double mutants carrying two mutations of the same class display wild-type vulval development. These results suggest that the synMuv genes encode the constituents of two redundant pathways that negatively regulate vulval development. We have cloned lin-36 III, a class B synMuv gene. Iin-36 was placed roughly halfway between egl-S and unc-36 by three-factor mapping experiments ( egl-5 (9/17) lin-36 (8/17) unc-36 )and was shown to be deleted by nD30420. Pools of cosmids from the implicated region were tested in germline transformation experiments. E02E3 rescued the Multivulva phenotype of both MT3022 lin-8 ( n111 ); lin-36 ( n747 )and MT1643 lin-36 ( n766 );lin- lin-15 ( n767 )).Rescuing activity was narrowed to a 5.0 kb SalI-XbaI fragment. This fragment was used to probe a mixed stage Northern blot, which showed a single transcript of approximately 3.3 kb. It was also used to probe the Barstead cDNA library and isolate a full length cDNA of 3400 bp containing both a poly-A tail and nine nucleotides of the SL1 trans-spliced leader. The sequence of this cDNA was determined. Conceptual translation revealed a hydrophilic protein of 962 amino acids with an estimated molecular weight of 108 kDa. This protein has no similarity to any known protein.