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[
Worm Breeder's Gazette,
1978]
All eyes are on the newest fashion trend, the Dumpy Look . Pace setting designer I.M. Worm s androgynous wardrobe is all the rage in Paris. Bianca Jagger quips, Tres, tres - Women s Wear Daily writes, Elegans personified - Patti Smith thinks, The punks won t buy it and Craig Russell says, It fits right in with my act . A product of Mutant Isolation, Inc.
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[
Worm Breeder's Gazette,
1976]
Unfertilized oocytes, 'squashy eggs', can be scored on a petri plate by adding a few drops of 0.05% Trypan blue to the surface of the plate. The oocytes take up the dye and worms and zygotes do not. The dye has no apparent effect on the worms left on the plate.
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[
Worm Breeder's Gazette,
1996]
We have examined the behavior of males of several wild type C. elegans strains which deposit a mating plug over the vulva after mating: AB2, RC301, CB4855 (aka 'Mr. Vigorous') and PA-2 (Hodgkin WBG 11-5: 60; 12-2: 82). AB2, isolated by Riddle and Bird (WBG 8-2: 52) in Adelaide, Australia, differs from the other three strains as follows. Among populations of AB2 males maintained for 3-4 days at 20 C in the absence of hermaphrodites mating plugs appear on 22-33% of the animals (three tests, 40-47 animals per test), invariably at the same position on the ventral side of the head. In the presence of hermaphrodites they do not do this. That plugs on hermaphrodites maintained with AB2 males were seen after only one day suggests that mate-less AB2 males grow more motivated and/or less discriminating with the passage of time. The ability of males to make plugs in the absence of hermaphrodites shows that males secrete the plug material themselves (or at least most of it) rather than stimulating the hermaphrodite to do so.
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[
Worm Breeder's Gazette,
1977]
Preliminary characterization of fifteen male-rescuable ts steriles by Nomarski observation and Feulgen staining allows classification by several different criteria. Hermaphrodites raised at the restrictive temperature (25 ) may have: 1) almost no sperm; 2) few sperm which appear abnormal under Nomarski and have uncondensed nuclei in Feulgen staining; 3) reduced numbers of normal-looking sperm, ranging from approximately 10% to 50% of wild-type sperm count, depending on the particular mutant; and 4) almost twice the wildtype sperm count (one mutant). In some mutants the unfertilized oocytes do not seem to continue to synthesize DNA as do N2 unfertilized oocytes, and retain pale discrete nuclei with Feulgen staining. While some mutants lay unfertilized oocytes and others do not, this does not seem correlated with the type of oocyte produced. tcrits generally coincide with the time of spermatogenesis, 20-50 hours. Fertile males have been found for several mutants; in others the males seem sterile even at 16 C. For males of three mutants, the sperm defect is ts reversible. Males raised at 25 C begin to produce cross progeny about 20-24 hours after being mated at 16 C. A fourth mutant, one of the abnormal sperm producers, is not reversible.
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Worm Breeder's Gazette,
1999]
We recently had a chance to do something only a handful of people have ever done: send an experiment up into space. We sent up an 'experimental' group of dauer larvae on the space shuttle Discovery's ten-day mission. ITA of Exton, PA, granted us a very small space on the shuttle. So we decided on the relatively small C. elegans. We figured since John Glenn was going up into space to see the effects on him, we'd do a similar study. We wanted to see if the conditions of space had any effect on the C. elegans normal 18-24 day life span. With every science experiment there is a control group and an experimental group. The control group of about 1000 worms stayed in Philadelphia at Northeast High School the other 1000 worms were blasted off into orbit October 29, 1998.
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[
Worm Breeder's Gazette,
1976]
Do your worms crawl out of their microwells polluting the genotypes of their neighbors? We find that 2ml disposable plastic beakers that are sold for use with Technicon Autoanalyzers make excellent tiny petri plates (they cost .07 apiece). They stand in the 24 well Falcon microtiter plates and no worm yet studied has made it from one well to the next. They can be sterilized with UV.
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[
Worm Breeder's Gazette,
1979]
I have observed that treatment of worms with the anesthetic propylene phenoxytol allows them to take up dyes into somatic tissues. Worms were fed 100 g/ml of Hoechst 33258 or ethidium bromide and then treated with 1:500 propylene phenoxytol in the presence of the dye. After fifteen minutes the worms are removed from the anesthetic. They recover in about 15 minutes and can be observed with the fluorescence microscope to have most of their somatic nuclei labelled. They are beautiful to watch. I do not know if these labelling conditions are optimal or how long the worms will live and remain stained. Presumably other dyes or drugs or substrates would get in too. Unfortunately, these conditions do not label the gonad. If anyone finds a way to get non-lipophilic labels into the gonad of an intact worm, please let me know.
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[
Worm Breeder's Gazette,
1993]
We have been trying to develop a set of classroom experiments that would use C. elegans to teach basic genetic concepts to high school students. For this purpose, C. elegans has obvious advantages over Drosophila, the current standard organism. Our goal is to have students doing the following experiments: isolating soil nematodes from the wild, and performing simple genetic crosses that would demonstrate dominant, recessive, and X-linked mutations. The immediate problem is teaching a high school student how to pick up and transfer a worm. First, in a class of 20-30 students, each student would ideally learn how to do this in a few minutes. Most worm-breeders will recall that it took us much longer to become proficient at worm-picking. However, a high school student will only use this skill for one or two experiments before moving on to another lab exercise. Also, most high schools only have a few low-quality dissecting microscopes that students must share, so microscope time becomes limiting. Second, the purchase of platinum wire and making of picks are inconvenient. We have had some recent success (ourselves, not with students) using bamboo skewers available in local supermarkets. It is possible to dab the skewer with sticky bacteria, and then dab up large worms to set up a mating. In this context, niceties like sterility or scratching the surface of the agar are not so important. So far we have not even tried to use C. elegans with a whole class. However, a few high school students have used C. elegans for longer-term after-school projects, and one recently won first prize in a county science fair. Please contact us if you have any suggestions or experience from teaching labs, etc.
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[
Worm Breeder's Gazette,
1996]
Exactly 100 years ago (Jan 10, 1896) Edwin Conklin published a paper entitled "Cell Size and Body Size." In it he posed the following question: do species that vary in adult body size differ in cell number or in cell size? His answer, for a genus of intertidal snails, was that species that vary in body size vary in cell number, but that cell size is more or less constant over evolutionary time.
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[
Worm Breeder's Gazette,
1991]
Ed Hedgecock came to Tokyo in January for the 2nd seminar on Molecular and Developmental Neurobiology and his cell migration work impressed scientists of other animal field. Sydney Brenner won the Kyoto Prize and came to Japan on 23 of October for receiving the Prize on his fourth visit in this year. He talked with his excellent joke about telescope in Astronomy and microscope in Biology. Sydney is the man who gave the main lecture in the First Meeting of Japan Molecular Biology Society. Iva Greenwald came to Japan for attending the Naito Foundation International Workshop on Morphogenesis Program in early November together with her fiance Gary Struhl. It is true that the relation between Drosophila and Caenorhabditis is very good in U.S. and Japan. Some nematode scientists in Japan got grant from Drosophila project. John Sulston gave the lecture entitled 'The Genome of Caenorhabditis' on 28th of November at the main invited lecture of the Thirteenth Meeting of Japan Molecular Biology Society in Kyoto International Congress Hall. The lecture impressed many Japanese scientists especially his 'The Logical Next Step: Genome Sequencing'. On the 27th night, 34 worm people assembled to the worm party for welcoming to him. Sixteen papers from five labs were presented at the meeting.