2001 Congress on In Vitro Biology - 2001 Meeting of the Society for In Vitro Biology - June 16-20, 2001 - St. Louis, Missouri - Abstracts

摘要

In hun'tans, a profound and progressive hearing loss'occurs as the result of a point mutation in the intron excision region of a gene necessary for actin polymerization. An understanding of this gene's distribution and mode of action in lower organisms may provide an important tool for understanding the molecular mechanism underlying this progressive loss of hearing in humans. In the mutant form of diaphanous, the actin polymerization necessary for cytoskeletal integrity of hair cells in the Organ of Corti, fails. Since the normal gene is essential for actin polymerization, I thought it might be widely distributed. I tested-the hypothesis that the specific primer I designed for the Drosophila gene would also target a region in Daphnia and result in its amplification during PCR. That hypothesis proved false. Either Daphnia does not have this particular gene, or the sequence is not matched to the region I chose to amplify with my Drosophila primers.