Tools for genetic mapping and gene identification in Caenorhabditis briggsae

Abstract

The nematode Caenorhabditis briggsae serves as an important companion species for Caenorhabditis elegans for comparative studies. Because C. briggsae exhibits androdioecious reproduction and ease of laboratory culture similar to C. elegans, it has long been used for genetic studies in cross-species comparisons of mutant phenotypes to uncover the evolution of gene function. Here, we provide an updated toolkit for C. briggsae genetic experiments, leveraging the resource of recently improved C. briggsae genome sequence assemblies with variant mapping tools and gene identification methods. We identify and validate a set of indel variants between CGC2 (AF16) and two divergent strains, HK104 and VX34. We then use these variants to genetically map 10 previously isolated mutations and identify the impacted genes using high-throughput sequencing. We combine these new genes with others curated from the literature into an updated map with 73 genes, providing an enriched resource for C. briggsae genetic studies.