Hello all,
I’m wondering if anyone here has looked at the maximal age that N2 hermaphrodites can be mated with N2 males and still produce progeny? I haven’t been able to find anything about it online so far.
Thank you!
Back when I was a graduate student we used to have joint group meetings with David Greenstein’s lab. I seem to recall they successfully mated hermaphrodites that had used up all of their sperm (I think the benchmark they used was 72h post-L4). All that was needed to restart the oocyte machinery was the presence of sperm and it’s hormone MSP, which signals meiotic maturation. In addition, a genetic strategy to enrich for cross-progeny is to only mate with hermaphrodites that have used up all of their sperm (as evidenced by the laying of oocytes on the plate instead of eggs). However, it has been noted that as hermaphrodites age the quality of their oocytes decline.
Hope that helps!
Best,
Steve
Steve is certainly right that hermaphrodites can successfully produce progeny if supplied with males, long after they’ve exhausted their own sperm.
Looking around a bit I find Pickett et al, and in particular Table 1, which gives values for “Reproductive span” for unmated and mated wild-type and fog-2 animals. They report mated wild-type mothers can produce progeny for 8.8 +/- 1.8 days, where the error is standard deviation (n=64). This should give a very good idea for the upper bound, though the fact that their hermaphrodites were continuously supplied with males, rather than going without for a few days, might be a factor.