Worm Breeder's Gazette 9(3): 35
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 have established a dose-response curve for the formaldehyde
induction of recessive lethals in the region balanced by eT1(III,V).
We used Moerman and Baillie's (Mutation Research, 80(1981) 273-279)
method of formaldehyde mutagenesis. The lethal induction frequencies
that we found
were:
{Figure 1}
We found that 65% of all the mutations lie on LGIII and 35% lie on
LGV which is very similar to our EMS results, see Johnsen and Baillie
WBG Vol.9 #2. There was no significant difference in the ratio of
lethals on the two Linkage Groups for the different formaldehyde doses.
We found that >90% of the expected number of F1's survived the 0.07%,
0.10% and 0.14% formaldehyde doses, there were no significant
difference for the three doses. The 0.17% dosage showed a drop to 80%
Fl survival. Thus, we predict that physiological damage will play a
major role at higher doses.
All the formaldehyde induced lethals are being two factor mapped to
either dpy-18 on LGIII or unc-46 on LGV. At the present time only the
ones on LGV are being analyzed further. We anticipate the recovery of
an overlapping set of short (1-2 m.u.) deficiencies that will further
sub-divide the zones established by Rosenbluth et. al. WBG Vol.9 #2.
We recommend a formaldehyde dose of <0.14% for future mutagenesis
experiments.
The research has been supported by NSERC and MDA(Canada) grants to
DLB.