The T seam cell lineage consists of an anterior branch which generates primarily hypodermal fates and a posterior branch which generates neuronal fates. Genes required to properly orient or specify the asymmetric cell fates in the T lineage include
lin-44/Wnt and
lin-17/Fz. In
lin-44 mutants, the polarity of the asymmetric divisions is reversed such that the anterior branch generates neuronal fates and the posterior branch generates hypodermal fates. Mutations in
lin-17 prevent the specification of the neuronal fates and as a consequence, both branches give rise to only hypodermal fates. Thus, mutations in
lin-44 cause polarity reversals, whereas mutations in
lin-17 result in "symmetric" divisions of the T lineage. We have previously reported that polarity of the T seam cell lineage is rendered symmetric in
lin-44(
n1792);
egl-20(
n585) double mutants as in
lin-17 single mutants (1,2). These data supported the model proposed by Sawa and Horvitz that two different Wnt signals could act through the
lin-17/Fz receptor to orient the asymmetric T cell divisions (3). Upon further examination of the double mutant, we have found that
egl-20 does not significantly influence T polarity in a
lin-44 background. One possibility for the mis-scoring is that all animals were staged and scored at the same time after hatching. However, the
lin-44;
egl-20 animals develop slightly slower than wild-type animals or
lin-17 and
lin-44 single mutants. Thus, at the time when the T granddaughters in wild-type animals had unambiguously adopted hypodermal and neural fates, the T granddaughters in
lin-44;
egl-20 animals had not completely differentiated and the neuronal cells were not distinguishable from the hypodermal cells. We have repeated the experiment by scoring all animals at similar developmental timepoints, such as when all P nuclei have descended into the ventral cord. To eliminate the possiblity of an error in strain construction, we have independently re-built and re-scored the double mutant strain. In all cases, the
lin-44;
egl-20 double mutants are not significantly different from
lin-44 single mutants. The results are shown in Table 1.