The realization of Caenorhabditis elegan"s nearly complete genome annotation has made it a useful model organism in which to study the effects of RNA-mediated interference (RNAi). C. elegans has approximately 19,920 genes, of which about 2807 have been uniquely associated with one or more RNAi phenotypes. Because RNAi inhibits gene-specific activity, we hypothesize that the introduction of double stranded RNA (dsRNA) specific to sequences of high similarity to known genes associate with RNAi phenotypes will have similar effects. After performing a bi-directional pairwise BLAST search, 141 unique genes were discovered that shared high sequence similarity with the 2807 genes of known RNAi-assocaited phenotype. Using Ste, Unc, Gro, and Emb phenotypes to test our approach, we successfully identified genes with comparable phenotypes in the
rrf-3 strains.