The clones are back

Good news for those of you using the C. elegans libraries held at Wellcome Sanger Institute – they have just restarted distribution of the C. elegans clone libraries they hold. The webpage is currently under development, so please email bioresource@sanger.ac.uk directly with your requests.

FEBS Junior Sections initiative

Students and young researchers from some of the national Societies have created the ‘FEBS Junior Sections‘, an initiative to connect young scientists in the molecular life sciences across Europe. They organise online events and the next one is a talk on C. elegans.

FEBS Junior Sections/Young NVBMB invite you to an online talk on “Elucidating the molecular mechanisms of protein aggregation in C. elegans as a living model system”. 

Time: 10 March 2022, 19:00 (CET) 

Registration:  https://network.febs.org/posts/young-nvbmb-febs-junior-sections-present-tessa-sinnige

The recorded webinar for the above event is now available for viewing.

Two new chapters in WormBook, GENETICS

Check out these new chapters in WormBook, GENETICS: “Mechanisms of sex determination and X-chromosome dosage compensation” by Barbara Meyer and “Germ granules and gene regulation in the Caenorhabditis elegans germline” by Carolyn Phillips and Dustin Updike.

C. elegans mutation accumulation lines ready soon

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We are writing to announce that the C. elegans mutation accumulation lines for which we wrote a grant proposal back in 2017 and for which you all generously provided letters of support are now almost ready for public dissemination.  First things first: THANK YOU ALL! We surely would not have been able to do this project without your kind support.  Details follow.  Please feel free to advertise this resource to your friends and neighbors, and to think up cool things to do with them.  We made them for everyone to use!

-Charlie Baer (University of Florida) and Vaishali Katju (Texas A&M University / Uppsala University, Sweden)

C. elegans mutation accumulation (MA) lines / community resource:

A set of ~1000 C. elegans spontaneous mutation accumulation (MA) lines will be publicly available in the next few months.  The lines are derived from six starting genotypes (strain list below) and have been maintained under standard conditions for a maximum of 300 generations (Gmax=300) of single-individual transfer (i.e., Ne≈1).  For each nearly-isogenic strain, we initiated two sets of 100 MA lines; one set maintained in the Baer lab at the University of Florida and one set maintained in the Katju lab at Texas A&M.  Lines have been cryopreserved at 50-generation intervals.  We also cryopreserved a set of 48 replicate “pseudolines” (PS lines) at the outset of the experiment; PS lines are identical to the MA lines except they have only diverged from the ancestor for ~3 generations rather than ~300 generations.  The PS lines have been and the Gmax=300 lines will be cryopreserved in sets of 48 lines, which can be shipped frozen upon request.  Cryopreserved intermediate generations are also available but have not been cryopreserved in sets.  Plans are afoot to sequence the genomes of the lines; sequence data will be made public as it is collected.  Please direct inquiries to Charles Baer (cbaer@ufl.edu).  Funding provided by NIH award GM127433.