DVC interneuron cGAL driver in Caenorhabditis elegans

Abstract

cGAL, a recently developed temperature-robust bipartite GAL4-UAS system in C. elegans, consists of two components: a cGAL “driver” that expresses the cGAL protein in specific cells using a promoter (i.e. neuron-specific or tissue-specific), and an “effector” that carries a gene of interest downstream of UAS (Wang et al., 2017). Crossing or combining a driver with an effector leads to the expression of the gene of interest in a cell-specific or tissue-specific manner. Here we report a new cGAL driver for the DVC interneuron. The ceh-63 promoter was chosen due to its restricted expression in the DVC neuron (Feng et al. 2012). The DVC interneuron driver construct containing the ceh-63 promoter (646 bp upstream of ATG translation start site) was injected into N2 and an integrated DVC driver line was generated. When crossed with the UAS-GFP effector strain (PS6843), the ceh-63 cGAL driver dictated GFP expression in the single DVC neuron (Figure 1), in addition to GFP in the coelomocyte from Punc-122::gfp co-injection marker. We did not observe GFP expression in uterus as reported by Feng et al., 2012.