Worm Breeder's Gazette 5(2): 49b
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.
A polypeptide which comigrates with worm muscle actin on 1-D and 2-D gels can be isolated from purified sperm. Careful quantitation of the Coomassie blue staining of this peptide using rabbit actin as a standard reveals that this putative actin is only 0.02% of the sperm's protein. It can be detected easily on autoradiograms of 2-D gels of 35s labelled sperm, it is barely detectable on Coomassie blue stained gels, but is strongly stained with the new silver stain. It comigrates exactly with muscle actin on the gel systems we have tried so far. It is probably in the sperm because it is not labelled by external surface labelling. Greg Nelson and Yair Argon found that by indirect immunofluorescence staining of spermatozoa with anti-actin antibodies, only the pseudopods stained. We do not know how it contributes to sperm motility.