Worm Breeder's Gazette 3(1): 14
These abstracts should not be cited in bibliographies. Material contained herein should be treated as personal communication and should be cited as such only with the consent of the author.
The strain R73 has previously been described as a revertant of unc- 54(e569) (Epstein, et al., J. Mol. Biol. (1974) 90:291-300; Mackenzie and Epstein, Nematode workshop, 1977). However, the fine structure as described by Mackenzie in Woods Hole strongly resembled the muscle of putative missense alleles of unc-15 (Waterston, et al., J. Mol. Biol. in press) and not that of any of the other mutants so far isolated and examined (Waterston, unpublished). Accordingly, R73 was obtained from H. Epstein and further genetic studies carried out. R73 fails to complement unc-15(e1214), with R73/e1214 heterozygotes resembling R73 in their muscle structure by polarizing microscopy. This defect in muscle structure maps close to dpy-5 I, and three factor crosses indicate that the mutation(s) lies near or to the right of unc-13. No evidence for a mutation(s) in the unc-54 gene was found. Thus R73 is apparently a partial revertant of an unc-15 allele, probably e73 and not unc-54(e569) (Where the error in bookkeeping occurred is unclear), and the large paracrystalline arrays, presumably of paramyosin, remain characteristic only of presumptive missense alleles of unc-15.