From owner-celegans@net.bio.net Tue May 20 23:00:00 1997
Path: biosci!lamg.com!Tritech_Research
From: Tritech_Research@lamg.com (Tritech Research)
Newsgroups: bionet.celegans
Subject: Re: c.elegans in High Schools?
Date: 21 May 1997 03:51:05 -0700
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CommEd,i.muchamore@wellcome.ac.uk,Internet writes:
I am interested in hearing from anyone that has experience in using
c.elegans for teaching high school students. I also have an idea
described below for such teaching and am looking for feedback on how
practical it may really be from researchers. 

- What practical work if any did the students carry out? Transferring,
sexing, identifying mutants, setting up crosses, molecular biology - how
sucessful was this?
- 
A new strain?
I am trying to develop a 'fool - proof' practical to illustrate the
inheritance of simple recessive disorders. If this is to be sucessful in
schools they will need to easily maintain a 'heterozygote' stock.
Students would pick a het off a plate and self cross. The resulting
phenotype would be a classic 3:1 ratio. 

My basic understanding of the available mutants makes me wonder if a
temperature senstive Par mutant would achieve this stock. It would also
need to have another strong phenotype which students could identify
after the  self cross. 

I have not been able to identify something which meets these criteria on
the on-line version on ACeDB - so if anyone has some bright ideas they
would be warmly appreciatted.

I look forward to hearing from some creative scientists.

Ian Muchamore
i.muchamore@wellcome.ac.uk

---------
Dear Ian,
The simplest way to have a stock that maintains heterozygousity
for a recessive gene is to use one of the available "Balancer" chromosomes.
For example a region of chomosome 2 is balanced by "C1"
So, there are a vairety of stocks you could order:
rol-1 / C1      throws adult rollers
lin-29 / C1    throws egg-laying deficient worms with a vulval "blip"
sqt-1 / C1       throws rollers that roll from during larval and adult stages

These strains will also throw 1/4 "C1" which are little sterile dumpy-uncs
that
look like micro-cigars 1/2 Wild-type, and 1/4 rollers, or whatever.
If you need to mate the homozygous recessive worms, also, then do not pick
lin-29,
because they can't be mated.

Hope this helps,
Andy Papp
tritech_research@LAMG.COM

.