Worm Breeder's Gazette 13(1): 78 (October 1, 1993)
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.
Members of the lin-12 /Notchfamily are found in all animals, and the genes display remarkable similarities in structure and biological function (see Greenwald and Rubin, 1992 and Struhl et al., 1993 for review and discussion). The products of these genes appear to function as receptors for intercellular signals, and it seems likely that other components of the signalling machinery are conserved. The recent finding that lag-2 ,a gene involved in lin-12 and glp-1 mediated cell fate decisions, encodes a protein with resemblance to apparent ligands for Notch (Tax and Thomas., 1993 Worm Meeting) supports this view. Given the conservation in structure and function of lin- 12/Notch proteins, we have attempted to identify C. elegans homologs of genes known to be involved in Notch-mediated cell signalling.
The Drosophila gene shaggy (also called zeste white-3.) encodes several alternatively spliced serine/threonine protein kinases which are thought to act downstream of Notch in a signaling pathway(see Ruel et al.,1993). We have utilized a PCR strategy to determine if a shaggy homolog exists in C. elegans. Several sets of degenerate primers, which were designed to conserved regions among shaggy homologs in several organisms, were used to amplify C. elegans genomic DNA. One such product showed a striking homology to the Drosophila shaggy gene. This C. elegans shaggy gene shows a remarkable 98% similarity and a 78% identity over 105 amino acids in the kinase domain. A C. elegans genomic Southern blot shows a single strong band. A genomic library screen has yielded several positive clones which have been sent to England for fingerprinting.
References
Greenwald and Rubin 1992 Cell 68, 271-281.
Reul et al., 1993 Nature 36, 557-559.
Struhl et al., 1993 Cell 74, 331-345.
Tax and Thomas., worm meeting abstract, 1993.
Reul et al., 1993 Nature 36, 557-559.
Struhl et al., 1993 Cell 74, 331-345.
Tax and Thomas., worm meeting abstract, 1993.