Michiko Serizawa, Keiko Hirono, Mina Iwata, Yohei Minakuchi, Yumiko Ueta, Yuji KOHARA, Tokie Oba, Tadasu SHIN-I, Ikuko Sugiura, Masahiro Ito, Masumi Obara, Takami Suzuki, Kyoko Nakata
[
International C. elegans Meeting,
2001]
We have been performing whole mount in situ hybridization using the cDNAs that have been classified in our EST project (See Thierry-Mieg et al.) as gene probes. Although there was a big delay in the project last year because we needed almost half a year to fix problems due to which our standard protocol suddenly didn't work, now we get the project back on the track and have finished some 7,600 genes. We have given minimal annotation to the in situ results; 10 stages for embryogenesis, 4 stages for larval-adult stage, on average 10 patterns (cell(s), tissue, region) per stage, 3 levels of relative intensity of signals per each pattern. Using the information, clustering analysis and extraction of consensus sequences in the upstream regulatory regions are in progress (see Ito et al.). Subsets of genes whose expression patterns are identical are being subjected to various analysis including RNAi, immunostaining and bioinformatic analysis (motif search, for example). This is a unique and powerful approach and, for example, we identified the function of proteasome in oocyte maturation and fertilization (see Hirono et al.). All the relevant data are integrated in NEXTDB and we are preparing to make them open by the worm meeting (See the demo by Shin-i et al.). In this report, we will show the content and the results of studies based on the database. Furthermore, we are planning "Annotation Relay" in which experts in various fields are invited to this lab by turns (a week or two per round and several people per round depending on the number of microscope) and look at the in situ slides on the microscope with the expert eyes to give more precise and deeper annotations to the in situ data than those we gave.