Worm Breeder's Gazette 17(1): 59 (October 1, 2001)
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.
Program in Molecular and Cell Biology, Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, Oklahoma City, OK, 73104.
Sodium-dependent neurotransmitter transporters are required for efficient clearance of neurotransmitters (and other bioactive molecules) from synaptic clefts. These proteins typically have 12 transmembrane domains and transport activity is dependent on Na+ and Cl-. Several of these transporters have well-established roles in behavior and/or neurological disorders; however, for many, the endogenous substrate and/or cellular functions are unknown. These transporters are generically designated as members of the Sodium:Neurotransmitter symporter Family, with the Pfam entry "SNF". There are at least 18 members of the SNF family in humans and 14 each in D. melanogaster and C. elegans. Sequence comparisons suggest that humans, fruitflies, and nematodes share a core set of SNF proteins, which include the dopamine, serotonin, and GABA transporters. In addition, each species has a unique set of SNF proteins. There are already two characterized members in C. elegans: dat-1 (T23G5.5) encodes the dopamine transporter (Duerr et al. 2001; Nass et al. 2001) and mod-5 (Y54E10BR.7) encodes the serotonin transporter (Ranganathan et al., 2000). By our analysis, there are 12 additional family members in the worm genome. We propose the C. elegans gene designation snf, consistent with the Pfam designation. The gene names are listed below in order of LG and map position. There are at least three additional genes that turn up in database searches, but have significantly lower BLAST scores and have not been given the snf designation. These include Y43D4A.1 (CE21874), F56F4.3 (CE11264), and C09E8.1 (CE19347). We now have knockouts of F55H12.1 (snf-2), T13B5.1 (snf-3), C49C3.1 (snf-9), Y32F6A.2 (snf-10), T03F7.1 (snf-11), and T25B6.7 (snf-12). Together with dat-1 and mod-5, there are now knockouts of 8 of the 14 gene family members (isolated by the Barstead and Mitani divisions of the Gene Knockout Consortium). Based on the subtlety of the phenotypes thus far, we think it is unlikely that any of these mutants will turn out to represent previously identified loci.
Proposed Name Cosmid ORF LG Map Position Wormpep snf-1 W03G9.1 I -0.46 CE14554 snf-2 F55H12.1 I 3.19 CE11206 snf-3 T13B5.1 II -13.5 CE13605 snf-4 Y46G5A.25 II 9.05 CE24297 snf-5 Y46G5A.30 II 9.05 CE24301 snf-6 M01G5.5 III -22.75 CE19539 snf-7 ZK1010.9 III 20.01 CE23490 snf-8 ZK829.10 IV 5.43 CE24742 snf-9 C49C3.1 IV 29.36 CE18554 snf-10 Y32F6A.2 V 2.57 CE16609 snf-11 T03F7.1 V 3.1 CE06344 snf-12 T25B6.7 X 0.31 CE14176