Worm Breeder's Gazette 8(3): 78
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 strain of C. isolated from the Kitsilano district of Vancouver by our colleague Fred Dill. Kitsilano derives its name from the North American Indian tribe. This strain is a self- breeding hermaphrodite and when N2 males are crossed with Kitsilano hermaphrodites, fertile males and hermaphrodites are produced. When grown on Petri plates in the laboratory, Kitsilano individuals have an 'unhealthy' appearance and a longer developmental time than N2. This strain produces a large number of morphological variants (paralyzed and dumpy worms) that do not breed true. After treatment with 0.01 M EMS, an F2 individual was recovered which has an N2-like appearance and growth rate. Thus we have two Kitsilano lines, the original and the modified (Kits M). On genomic blot-hybridizations, Kitsilano has an N2-like Tc1 pattern with a couple of altered Tc1 fragments. We have now prepared mitochrondria from the N2 strain, and are in the process of comparing the mitochrondrial DNA restriction patterns of the N2, BO and Kits strains. We hope to be able to estimate the time of evolutionary divergence of C. elegans strains. This may tell us if Kitsilano arrived in Vancouver in 1973 (with David Baillie from Cambridge) or is a truly Canadian strain of C. elegans (eh?).