Worm Breeder's Gazette 3(2): 5
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.
With lots of help from the Medical Research Council, especially Marilyn Dew, we now have a core collection of C. elegans E stocks, and we (Claire, Kari & I) hereby offer to supply requested strains. At John Sulston s request, I have also agreed to handle two other functions: maintaining the genetic map and administering the genetic clearing house. At present, we have no special support for this work. As many of you know, Don Murphy at NIA is exploring the possibility of supporting a stock center, which could be here or somewhere else. At any rate, I think it makes sense to have the mapkeeping and clearing house operations affiliated with the stock collection, and on the advice of John Sulston and Bob Horvitz, I have defined what, with your support and help I propose to do, for the time being at least: 1. Stockkeeping: Keep and supply requests for at least one mutant per mapped gene or know where in North America the mutants can be obtained. 2. Mapkeeping: (a) Solicit new data (actual counts, complementation results, etc.) on both old and new genes, and update the official map records as such data become available. (b) Submit new data for publication in the Newsletter. These data would include, besides linkage results, interesting properties of new or old genes. 3. Genetic clearing house-keeping: (a) Register new lab symbols, which, in accordance with Bob Horvitz s nomenclature paper, are one or two letters, used as non-ized upper case prefixes for strain names and ized lower case prefixes for mutation names. (b) Register new gene names and list them in the Newsletter. The laboratory assigned to a gene name is then responsible for issuing gene numbers. I hereby solicit data, comments, suggestions, etc. What follows is a list of E stocks available, some new map data, and a few clearing house assignments. Please note: We have taken a cue from the E. coli stock center and have not attempted to confirm the gentoypes of all stocks. We certainly have checked all the more obvious phenotypes, such as for unc and dpy mutants, and we ve been careful in handling heterozygotes, but we have not confirmed some of the other mutants, such as cat, che and flu. If you request any of the latter class, it will be useful if you inform us, say upon acknowledging receipt of the stocks, how they checked out, and we can record that information. In the list that follows, if no mutation name is given for a homozygous single mutant, it can be derived from the strain name, (i.e. , strain E769 has the following genotype: bli-1(e769)).