| Expression patterns of gene products provide important insights into gene function. Reporter constructs are frequently used to study gene expression in Caenorhabditis elegans, but the sequence context of a given gene is inevitably altered in such constructs, which may therefore lack important regulatory elements. I describe the development of Gene C ATCHR, a novel method of generating reporter-fusions of worm genes that exploits yeast homologous recombination. Yeast homologous recombination facilitates the cloning of large genomic regions, allowing the isolation of complete open reading frames and regulatory sequences in promoters, untranslated regions and flanking DNA. Gene CATCHR thus preserves the original regulatory context of a given gene as much as possible. Comparisons to genes with known expression patterns validate the use of the Gene CATCHR system. Further, novel expression data was generated. Mutant rescue experiments demonstrate that Gene CATCHR-generated transgenes are functional. Gene CATCHR represents a valuable tool to study gene expression. |
