CSM News Electronic Edition Volume 3, number 1 July 2, 1994 Please submit abstracts of your papers as soon as they have been accepted for publication by sending them to CSM-News@worms.cmsbio.nwu.edu. Back issues of CSM-News, the CSM Reference database and other useful information is available by anonymous ftp from worms.cmsbio.nwu.edu [165.124.233.50], via Gopher at the same address, or by World Wide Web through www.nwu.edu. ============= Announcement ============= Updated versions of Richard Sucgang's Dictyostelium Gene Disruption Table (DGDT) have been added to the archive. ========== Abstracts ========== Discovery of myosin genes by physical mapping in Dictyostelium. Margaret A. Titus*, Adam Kuspa`, & William F. Loomis * Department of Cell Biology Duke University Medical Center Durham NC, 27710 and Center for Molecular Genetics Department of Biology University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093 ` present address: Department of Biochemistry Baylor College of Medicine 1 Baylor Plaza Houston, TX 77030 Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, in press. Abstract The diversity of the myosin family in a single organism, Dictyostelium discoideum, has been investigated by a strategy devised to rapidly identify and clone new members of a gene family. An ordered array of YAC clones that encompasses the Dictyostelium genome was probed at low stringency with conserved regions of the myosin motor domain to identify all possible myosin loci. The previously identified myosin loci (mhcA, myoA - E) were detected by hybridization to the probes as well as an additional seven previously unidentified loci (referred to as myoF - L). Clones corresponding to five of the new loci (myoF - J) were obtained by using the isolated YACs were used as templates in a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) employing degenerate primers specific for conserved regions of the myosin head. Sequence analysis and physical mapping of these clones confirms that these PCR products are derived from five previously unidentified myosin genes. Preliminary analysis of these sequences suggests that at least one of the genes (myoJ) encodes a member of a potentially new class of myosins. With the development of whole genome libraries for a variety of organisms, this approach can be used to rapidly explore the diversity of this and other gene families in a number of systems. -------------------------------------------------------------------- [End CSM-News, volume 3, number 1]