C. elegans feeds by stereotypic contraction and relaxation of pharygeal muscles. To understand feeding behavior, we have isolated and characterized mutants that affect the pharyngeal muscle action potential. The mutants are short and egg-laying constitutive.
Mutants are long, loopy and egg-laying defective.
Preliminary evidence indicates that in these mutants pharyngeal muscle action potentials have a reduced rate of depolarization. Normally, embryonic muscle contraction occurs apparently independently of the nervous system function at this stage. We are collaborating with Leslie Lobel to clone eat-12. We localized it to a cosmid and showed that the cosmid can rescue several eat-12 mutants by germ line transformation. We are analyzing eat-12 alleles to see if the calcium channel gene is mutated.