C. elegans Fosmid Library 

The availability of genomic clones with 35 to 40kb inserts has been a critical resource to the C. elegans community. Fingerprinted and ordered cosmid clones harboring such inserts were the backbone of the sequencing project. Further utility was found, when individual research labs were trying to map mutants. Complementing a mutant by injecting a strain with overlapping cosmid clones eventually led to mutation identity. This approach is still widely used and is an important tool for mutational analysis. Many of the cosmid libraries are now 20 years old and there are reports of some of them losing viability.

With these considerations in mind Don Moerman et al have chosen to make a fosmid rather than a cosmid library. The library was constructed using the fosmid vector pCC1FOS (Epicentre) and is maintained at low copy number until induced. The use of fosmids as backbones allows for the maintenance of large pieces of DNA (around 40kB) in limited number (1-5) per bacterial host. Up to this point, such a resource was unavailable for C. elegans.

The N2 fosmid clones are mapped to the C. elegans genome by pair-wise alignment of fosmid end-reads. Initial analysis of the library quality shows that the average insert size is ~ 43,284 bp and 86.7% of the clones have paired end-reads with correct relative orientation. The library obtained approximately 5.74X clone coverage of the genome

This resource was presented at the Fifteenth International C. elegans meeting.

Format

Geneservice offers the complete clone set of 41 384-well microtitre plates or individual clones, for research purposes only. There's also a C. elegans FOS finder tool available that allows you to search for your gene or region of interest. We can also make subsets of your chosen clones from the collection. Please contact biohelp to discuss your requirements.

References

Jaryn Perkins^1,2, Kim Wong³, René Warren³, Jacquie Schein³, Jeff Stott³, Rob Holt³, Steve Jones³, Marco Marra³, and Don Moerman^1,2

• ¹Michael Smith Laboratories, U.B.C., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6T 1Z4
• ²Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia, B.C. Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Z4
• ³Genome Sciences Centre, BC Cancer Agency, Vancouver, B.C. Canada, V5Z 4S6