male induction

Is there any way to obtain a lot of fertile male worms (with no contamination of hermaphrodites)?
Any ts mutants? Any genes to RNAi to induce male progeny?

Some of the dosage compensation mutations show sex-specific (XX) lethality but are not fully penetrant. An alternative is to use Nitex filters to separate males from hermaphrodites. The protocol is from Klass and Hirsh (1981) and can also be found in Methods in Molecular Biology v. 351 (K. Strange, ed.) or Methods in Cell Biology v. 48 (Shakes & Epstein, eds.). Two rounds of filtering yields ~99% pure males.

Harold

Postscript: If it’s essential that there be zero fertile hermaphrodites in the population, you can filter fem-3gf worms reared at the restrictive temperature. Those hermaphrodites make only sperm.

Harold

You should take a look at Jonathan Hodgkin’s 1999 piece “Strains for making enriched or pure male samples” in the Worm Breeder’s Gazette, Vol. 15 #5. Note that Hodgkin also mentions the usefulness of filtering, but cites a reference different from those cited above by Harold above, Lewis & Fleming (1995); it might be worth checking out that protocol as well as those he cited.

Thank you very much!!!

Those are very helpful information!

Thanks again. :slight_smile: