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| Pattern | Anti-MEC-8 serum recognized a nuclear antigen in wild-type C. elegans embryos. The youngest embryos to exhibit immunostaining contained about 50 cells, all of which showed nuclear staining. All nuclei showed staining in embryos containing up to hundreds of nuclei. Two mec-8 mutants, mec-8(u391) and mec-8(u314), failed to show any trace of nuclear staining at any stage of development. During the late proliferative phase of embryogenesis, prior to the onset of morphogenesis, MEC-8 staining was confined largely to hypodermal nuclei. Prior to this shift, MEC-8 was found in most nuclei, including nuclei that were also marked with an hlh-1::lacZ reporter, which is expressed in early blastomeres that subsequently produce only body wall muscle cells; but MEC-8 was not detectable in body muscles after the onset of morphogenesis. In L1-L4 larvae, MEC-8 was detected by anti-MEC-8 serum in the nuclei of the large hypodermal syncytium, hyp7, that covers most of the worm. This staining was fainter than the staining of the embryonic hypodermal nuclei, became even fainter during later larval development and was undetectable in adults. The nuclei of head hypodermal cells not fused with hyp7 (hyp4 and hyp5 nuclei in particular) stained well with anti-MEC-8 in all larval stages and in adults. Anti-MEC-8 also stained the nuclei of many neurons in the head (probably including chemosensory neurons); a few neurons in the central body region [including the ALM and AVM touch neurons, and neurons in the post-deirid]; vulval nuclei in L4 and adult stage hermaphrodites; anterior- and posterior-most intestinal nuclei; and other unidentified nuclei in the head and tail. The anterior-most muscle nuclei in the heads of larvae had low but detectable levels of MEC-8, but none of the muscle cells in the main body appeared to stain with anti-MEC-8. | Primary Identifier | Expr2304 |
| Subcellular Localization | nuclear staining |
