WormBase lists various phenotypes for RNAi, but as far as I know nobody has published a list of genes
whose RNAi phenotypes are immediately lethal, even in well-grown worms. For instance, nobody
has published a list of genes that rapidly kill adult worms when those adults are fed RNAi only in adulthood.
There was one paper from the Ruvkun lab that listed genes that had generally lethal RNAi phenotypes
(e.g., embryonic lethal) but that extended life when fed to adult worms (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17411345).
In principle, one might extract a list of sudden-onset lethal RNAis from their screening results.
Unfortunately, their paper didn’t have the full RNAi result set as a supplementary data file, and
e-mail inquiries didn’t elicit the results either.
Does anybody out there know of any paper that does list sudden-death RNAi phenotypes for any worm genes?
Or, for that matter, any unpublished findings that could be made public knowledge?
Thanks for any information that you have.
I don’t recall ever hearing of such an effect, though I’ve never sought one out.
Relatedly: are there any ts-lethal mutants with such an effect? Any such that the temperature shift will rapidly kill the mutant animals while leaving the wild type animals fairly happy? I don’t recall hearing of such, but, again, haven’t gone out and looked for them.
There are heat-stress (and other stress) treatments that will fairly rapidly kill wild-type animals but not stress-resistant mutants. Presumably mutants that were stress-hypersensitive or defective in stress-response (daf-16, maybe?) could be rapidly killed under conditions that would leave the wild type intact, although I haven’t looked at whether the literature has any good protocols to achieve such an effect and I suspect RNA (and especially RNAi feeding) would be far worse than a mutant. You could probably heighten such an effect by playing with stress preconditioning - animals with a normal stress response have a heightened ability to survive a stress they’ve previously been exposed to, which should act to increase the separation between stress-competent animals and those lacking a functional stress response. It’s not quite what you asked for, and for it to work at all would require more faith in RNAi than I really have, but it might work. Could be easier than finding an RNAi that under completely normal conditions rapidly kills.