AVA-specific promoter?

Hi,

as part of my ongoing series of questions regarding biolistic transformation I have a question regarding construct promoters.

I want to use an “AVA-specific” promoter to create a promoter-gene construct for transformation.

I first came across opt-3/pept-3 in the list of cell-specific reporters only to find that the original description of AVA-specific was, in fact, AVE-specific.

flp-18 also turned out to be non AVA-specific.

What I’m left with at the moment is rig-3, but I’m concerned that this option is a compromise…several papers have used this as an AVA-specific promoter, but rig-3 drives expression in other cells such as I1, I4, M4 and NSM.

Is rig-3 as good as I’m going to get and am I going to get a kicking when I say in the future that I used it as an AVA-specific promoter?

Regards

Steve

Why not try doing your experiment with 2 promoters whose expression only overlaps in AVA? If you get the effect with both, chances are good that AVA is the site-of-action.

My wormweb.org database also suggests dbl-1 as a possible AVA-specific promoter, though the source paper says they also saw expression in the ventral cord: http://wormweb.org/neuralnet#c=AVA&m=1

Hi,

first of all, thanks for taking the time and effort to reply. I hadn’t picked up dbl-1 as a possible ava-specific promoter…next time I’ll include a wormweb search!

I’ll have to wait another 3 months before the subscription at my uni allows me to read the full Zhang & Zhang article, but the info from wormbase suggests that AFD (rather than AVA specifically), a bunch of ventral cord neurones and muscle/neurones in the pharynx light up with a gfp reporter. As I can’t see the pics from the Z & Z paper, I can’t tell if their data looks different.

The idea about using overlapping expression is one that I also thought of (using glutamate receptor variants). However, the main problem stems from how “noisy” the expression of any “mainly” AVA-specific promoter + gene constructs will be as this might compromise the experiment.

What I want to test is whether expressing a receptor in a neurone where it is not normally detected changes the effect of a particular drug. If the receptor is also expressed in other neurones as well as AVA, then any AVA-specific changes in the action of the drug might be masked by its actions in other neurones.

I will just have to try out a bunch of AVA or mostly AVA-specific promoters and observe what happens I guess.

Thanks again for your suggestions though.

Steve