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Rapid selection of transgenic C. elegans using antibiotic resistance

Abstract

Caenorhabditis elegans is an important model organism in biology, but until now no antibiotic selection markers have been successfully demonstrated for this species. We have developed a selection system using puromycin that allows the rapid and easy isolation of large populations of transgenic worms. This approach is sufficiently powerful to select single-copy transgenes, does not require any particular genetic background and also works in C. briggsae.

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Figure 1: Puromycin selection in C. elegans.
Figure 2: Applications of puromycin selection.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the European Research Council (ERC), Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Spain′s Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MICINN) Plan Nacional, Catalan Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca (AGAUR) and the European Molecular Biology-Centre for Genomic Regulation (EMBL-CRG) Systems Biology Program. Some nematode strains used in this work were provided by the Caenorhabditis Genetics Center, which is funded by the US National Institutes of Health National Center for Research Resources.

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Contributions

The project was conceived and planned by J.I.S. and B.L. The experiments were performed by J.I.S. and R.G.-V. The manuscript was written by J.I.S. and B.L.

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Correspondence to Ben Lehner.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Supplementary Figures 1–8, Supplementary Tables 1–2 and Supplementary Note (PDF 3306 kb)

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Semple, J., Garcia-Verdugo, R. & Lehner, B. Rapid selection of transgenic C. elegans using antibiotic resistance. Nat Methods 7, 725–727 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1495

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