Shohei Mitani et al. (2003) International Worm Meeting "Isolation and distribution of Caenorhabditis elegans deletion mutants: a custom screening service by National Bioresource Project in Japan."

Shohei MItani, Keiko Gengyo-Ando, Satoko Hanaka

[International Worm Meeting, 2003]

Deletion mutants are useful to understand molecular mechanisms underlying the various biological phenomena and to analyze genetic pathways and biochemical changes in Caenorhabditis elegans. Those mutants are mostly powerful to examine phenotypes in detail and in combination with transgenes. To help the international research activity of the C. elegans community, we started to set up a screening and distributing service system by the support of Ministry of Education, Culture, Science, Sports and Technology of Japan. We are now ready to isolate and distribute mutants by requests from research community. Researchers can add new target genes via WWW on the homepage of the National Biorescource Project for C. elegans. We will screen for mutants in an order as requested. However, to decrease duplicated effort, please avoid targets that have been in queue on homepage of other public KO projects. We would omit the targets if the mutants have been isolated elsewhere. On the home page, we will post the status of each target gene on which process of the screening, so that mutants which would be isolated soon could be visible to the researchers. In the cases, that the targets are very difficult to knockout and will take longer time, we will add the comments to the target gene list.Already isolated mutants are posted on the database by the manner searchable and sorted by gene names. Alleles in which are interested by researchers could be further inspected by the information about the nature of deletion sites, primers used and brief description about the phenotype if known. We also post laboratory by corresponding researcher names to which we have sent the mutants so that researchers can work cooperatively by interacting among laboratories by themselves. As a new trial by this project, we would like to ask researchers who have obtained even the negative data regarding what they are interested in to send information about what have been examined. This kind of information, usually being left unpublished, must be informative before researchers begin to study related genes. Such cooperative works by the community would yield more results in terms of cost-performance of the C. elegans research in near future. URL