I am doing research for my docter’ degree, using C.elegans as a model. Now I should verify the background of 5 elegans strains . But there is no genetic information of the following two strains at wormbase: tax-6(jh107) and cnb-1(jh103) . How can I get it? From related research papers? Are there any other fast way to solve this problem?
Not really sure of what information you are looking for. If you look at the wormbase page for tax-6, and then scroll down to alleles and click on your allele, you find this page:
http://www.wormbase.org/db/gene/variation?name=WBVar00088093;class=Variation
Which doesn’t contain any specific information regarding the molecular nature of the lesion in the tax-6 allele. However, if you click on the paper that identified your allele, you will find they do know the point mutation that defines that allele of tax-6.
Hope this helps.
WormBase has pages that give information about each strain for which an allele was identified. From the tax-6 gene summary page:
http://www.wormbase.org/db/gene/gene?name=WBGene00006527;class=Gene
Click on the ‘Strains carrying tax-6’ field to go here (note that other strains carry this mutation):
http://www.wormbase.org/db/gene/strain?name=KJ306;class=Strain
There is not always a lot of information about a strain, it all depends on what data was submitted to the CGC.
Thanks for your reply.
I think I should state my problem in detail. I mean I want to get the exact mutation information in order to verify the backgroud of the mutant strain in our lab. For example, I know tax-6(p675) is a point mutation at wormbase, then I can verify whether the mutant in our lab is the right background by sequencing. But now I can not get the similar information at wormbase. That’s the question.
The isolation of these alleles was performed in the laboratory of Joohong Ahnn, which you can tell through WormBase or by recognizing the prefix in their allele numbers. I’m not sure whether the isolation of these alleles has been described in detail (at least three papers - 1, 2, 3 - that use one or the other allele mention their isolation but neither give a lot of detail nor cite other papers that do; I didn’t look further). If the precise molecular nature of the deletions has not been published, you probably shouldn’t expect WormBase to contain the information.
These are deletion alleles, isolated because PCR of the mutant locus gives a smaller product than it does from the wild type. You could contact Dr. Ahnn to see whether he might be able to share more information about the precise nature of the alleles. Or, you could do some PCRs to find primers that detect the deletion and wild-type alleles. It is also possible to do strain constructions using balancer chromosomes or visible markers to follow your mutations in trans; if sufficient care is taken, it should not be necessary to confirm the presence of the mutation by sequencing.
WormBase describes a lot of mutational information about alleles, but this is all because of the hard work of WormBase staff who have to go and read the papers and manually enter that information into the database. Given that people have been describing C. elegans alleles since before WormBase was created, it is likely that there are a lot of older papers sitting there waiting for someone to read them and submit the info by hand.
Modern papers makes it a bit easier to capture the data as tools like Textpresso can help flag alleles that might need curation. But at the end of the day you have to accept that there is a lot of useful biological information sitting in papers on library shelves waiting to be ‘mined’. Or waiting for databases to have enough money to pay someone to mine it! 
I meant to add a practical suggestion. Find out what lab originally described the allele and try emailing the PI (if they are still around). Sometimes this info doesn’t always make it to the paper, but is sitting in a lab notebook somewhere.
The paper listed as the reference for the allele in question contains the nature of the mutation. It is a point mutation.
Thank you all for your kindly help. I have sent email to the professor Joohong Ahnn. I will keep in contact with you guys