Worm Breeder's Gazette 5(2): 31
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.
Extracts from larvae and adults were prepared using different methods: Animals were resuspended in buffer and homogenized either with a dounce, in a mortar with an equal weight of powdered glass or by sonication. The fourth method involved direct treatment of the animals for 10 min at 100 C in the presence of SDS and - mercaptoethanol. After centrifugation to remove large debris, the suspension (with addition of supplementary -mercaptoethanol in the last method) was analyzed on a polyacrylamide gradient (3.75 to 15 %) in the presence of urea and SDS. After electrophoresis, proteins were stained with Coomassie blue. We observed some variations in the protein pattern depending on the technique used for solubilization. Patterns allowing comparison of adults and larvae were best obtained when sonication was employed to disrupt the animals. Under such conditions, two high molecular weights (> 100,000 daltons) bands are present in adults but never in larvae. These bands look similar to the one found by Klass et al. (Dev. Biol., 1979, 69, 329-335) using labelled polypeptides. Caracterization of these two polypeptides is in progress.