A semi-automated high-throughput approach to the generation of transposon insertion mutants in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans

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Abstract
The generation of a large collection of defined transposon insertion mutants is of general interest to the Caenorhabditis elegans research community and has been supported by the European Union. We describe here a semi-automated high-throughput method for mutant production and screening, using the heterologous transposon Mos1 . The procedure allows routine culture of several thousand independent nematode strains in parallel for multiple generations before stereotyped molecular analyses. Using this method, we have already generated >17 500 individual strains carrying Mos1 insertions. It could be easily adapted to forward and reverse genetic screens and may influence researchers faced with making a choice of model organism.