NEMAGENETAG

NEMAGENETAG is a European-community funded network of six labs. Details can be found on the NEMAGENETAG website. One of the aims of the consortium is to generate a large collection of defined transposon insertion mutants, using Mos1. Our contribution has been to generate mutant strains that were then sent to Patty Kuwabara’s lab in Bristol and Laurent Ségalat’s lab in Lyon for molecular characterisation. Yohann Duverger and Sarah Scaglione worked full-time on the project using the genopole platform, funding from Europe and the RNG, and in collaboration with the IMVT.

The protocol that used and the automation that we implemented are described in a recent article:

A semi-automated high-throughput approach to the generation of transposon insertion mutants in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans

Nucleic Acids Research 2007; doi: 10.1093/nar/gkl1046 [PDF]

By the end of 2006, we were generating more than 5,500 strains per month. Because this exceeded the capacity of our partners to handle strains, for the final 6 months, we limited our production, and as shown in the graph below, we generated a total of 55,000 strains.

Once the insertion site of these strains is determined, they are entered into the Mos1 database and then, with a certain delay, into Wormbase (search “alleles”, with the term “tt”). These mutants are freely available to the research community.

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