Genetic enhancer interactions are identified by comparing RNAi phenotypes of library genes in wild-type animals with those seen in mutant worms carrying a defined lesion in a single query gene; a genetic interaction between a query gene and a library gene is observed if the phenotype of the combined perturbation is greater than the sum of the two individual perturbations.
Animals die during embryonic development. In C. elegans, often assayed as refractile eggs that fail to hatch; when applied to large-scale RNAi screens in C. elegans, more than 10% of embryos die.
