Worm Breeder's Gazette 9(2): 89
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.
We are continuing to use anesthetic hypersensitivity of certain mutants of C. elegans to understand the mechanism of action of inhalation anesthetics. Both unc-79 and unc-80, which have nearly identical phenotypes, are much more sensitive than N2 to the very lipid soluble volatile anesthetics. Using this hypersensitivity, we have mapped unc-80 to LGV, approximately 10 map units to the right of dpy-21. The double mutant unc-79;unc-80 is only slightly more sensitive to these agents than either mutation alone. An X-linked suppressor of this hypersensitivity, ec-27, has been identified as an allele of unc-9. Unlike e101, the reference allele of unc-9, ec27/0 males can mate. The double mutants unc-79;e101 and unc-80;e101 are identical in anesthetic response to unc-79;ec27 and unc-80;ec27 for all agents tested to date. We have constructed a mutant strain sDp3/unc-79 dpy-17 unc-79 unc-36 rovided by David Baillie). The duplication sDp3 contains a wild-type copy of each mutant marker, and is lost at a low frequency from mitotic cells. Using this strain we hope to isolate individual animals that are somatic mosaics for the gene unc- 79 and analyze their anesthetic sensitivity.