Worm Breeder's Gazette 14(3): 9 (June 1, 1996)

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 C.elegans cDNA project : A progress report

Yuji Kohara, Tomoko Motohashi, Hiroaki Tabara, Hisako Watanabe, Akiko Sugimoto, Masako Sano, Akiko Miyata

Gene Library Lab, National Institute of Genetics, Mishima 411, Japan

Tag sequencing: After analysis of 16,000 cDNA clones, we have again 
picked up about 100,000 clones at random and have gridded.  The gridded 
filters were probed with a pool of the representative clones of about 
1,000 cDNA groups which contained more than 5 clones.  The negative 
clones in the hybridization are now being subjected to the tag sequencing 
analysis.  So far 19,200 clones gave 12,806 clean 3'-tag sequences, which 
have been classified into 4,610 cDNA groups (genes).   The clones also 
gave 16539 clean 5'-tag sequences.

Expression patterns: Using our multi-well version of in situ 
hybridization(1), we have analyzed embryonic expression patterns of about 
500 cDNA groups mostly from the sequenced region of LGIII.  Closer 
analysis of the expression patterns is a tough work and therefore still 
in progress, but, roughly, more than 1/4 of the groups show specific 
expression in embryogenesis.  Now we are concentrating on establishing 
the conditions for large-scale in situ analysis on post-embryonic worms 
in order to extend the in situ analysis to the whole life of worm.   

Thanks to the efforts by the DDBJ staffs, all the data on the cDNA clones 
(5'- and 3'-tag sequences, classification of the cDNA clones, the sizes 
of cDNA inserts, mapping data, homology information, etc) are now 
available via anonymous FTP and WWW at the following sites.  Although 
these data will be eventually sent to ACEDB, frequent updating will be 
made at these sites.  We particularly thank Prof. Takashi Gojobori and 
Hideaki Sugawara at DDBJ for their arrangements.  The cDNA clones are, 
of course, available from us.  We are preparing to make the in situ 
images available at the WWW site.

FTP:  ftp.nig.ac.jp (directory: /ftp/pub/db/YK01)
WWW:  http://www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp/c-elegans/html/CE_INDEX.html


(1) H. Tabara et al. , Nucleic Acids Research, 24 #11 (1996) in press.