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., N_e≈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.