VWA8 proteins, named for von Willebrand factor A (VWA) domain containing 8, are conserved from worm to mammals (Whittaker & Hynes, 2002). In human, two SNPs (
rs9566845 and
rs9566867) in
vwa8 are found to be associated with bipolar disorder with comorbid migraine (Oedegaard et al., 2010). Another SNP (
rs9532931) is tentatively associated with a specific sub-group of autism patients (Anney et al., 2010). The C. elegans VWA-8 long isoform shares 38% and 55% amino acid sequence identity and similarity, respectively, with human VWA8 long isoform. We showed that endogenous VWA-8 is expressed in mitochondria of somatic tissues, except neurons (Zhu, Chisholm & Jin, 2020). To determine the function of C. elegans
vwa-8, we generated a null allele
vwa-8(
ju1659) by CRISPR-Cas9.
vwa-8(
ju1659) mutants are homozygous viable, and indistinguishable from wild type in gross phenotypes such as body size, brood size, growth rate and movement.