Worm Breeder's Gazette 9(3): 21
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 isolated seven EMS-induced mec-14 mutants in a screen for touch insensitive animals. The gene maps between sma-3 and lin-13 on L. G. III. None of the alleles is an amber mutation, but there is no enhancement of the mutant phenotype (touch insensitivity) in heterozygotes of the canonical mutation (u55) and a deficiency for the gene (nDf16). We have not seen any abnormalities in the touch cells ( ALM, AVM, or PVM) in electron micrographs the mutants. We also isolated a spontaneous mec-14 mutant from TR679. The mutant contains a 4.6 kb EcoRI fragment that cosegregates with the mec-14 mutation. We have cloned this (minus the Tc1 which was excised using Ba1I) into pUC18, and have used the resulting plasmid (pTU4) to probe genomic DNA from wild type and mutant strains. N2 contains a single hybridizing band at 3.0 kb; a spontaneous revertant and its Mec sibling yielded bands of 3.0 and 4.6 kb, respectively. One of the EMS- induced alleles (u82) had an unusual EcoRI fragment (it was slightly smaller). All together these data suggest that we have cloned, at least, part of the mec-14 gene. John Sulston and Alan Coulson have located the mec-14 gene (using a lambda clone) to the middle of a fairly large contig (approx. 200 kb). Since a number of genes lie within 0.1 map units of mec-14 (between the ends of nDf16 and nDf20 - lin-16, lin-13, be a very useful contig. We are going to see if we can find the endpoints of the deficiencies and, if the contig extends far enough, the eT1 breakpoint on III.