Gal4-UAS system

I’ve noticed that the GAL4-UAS system is not well-represented in the C. elegans world and was wondering whether this is due to historical or practical issues. Does anyone know whether using the GAL4-UAS system is particularly challenging in C. elegans? If so, any ideas why?

Thanks,
J

Hello, I’ve seen on wormbase that the Korswagen lab try to introduce this system in C.elegans, but unfortunately it was working only if you use really strong promoter for driving GAL4.

I don’t think they keep working on this system. It does not look to be be really efficient in C.elegans.

Thanks for the reply, Thomas! I agree that the impression left by this 2005 abstract is that efficiency is a problem, but I was hoping that someone else might have tried or that there may be rumors of progress since this abstract. Anecdotal evidence about past failed attempts would also help me to know whether this approach is a dead end.

Best,
JDH

Kang Shen’s lab had a nice talk at the last worm meeting on the development of a different system. Overall it looked really good, although I don’t believe it’s published yet.

http://www.wormbase.org/db/misc/paper?name=WBPaper00038861;class=Paper

k.

I have studied a bit the Q system, i don’t know if it’s going to be something something usefull for everybody.
The original paper made on drosophila shows that the induction of the system is quite long. You need to feed your animals with a specific substrate, and if i remember well it takes several hour to see the begining of an induction.

I think that the heat-shock promoter + cell-specific expression of hsf-1 protein in hsf-1 mutant backgroung is one of the best system so far to make spatio-temporal expression (you can add to this the FLP/FRT system which looks to work well as well.)

The paper of the Shen lab just came out today about the q system :

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22406855?dopt=Abstract