Suppression of supernumerary seam cell nuclei in <i>let-7</i> mutants.

<p>(A) While wild-type worms have 16 seam cell nuclei, <i>let-7(n2853)</i> worms have significantly more (∼23) <a href="http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1003353#pgen.1003353-Hayes1" target="_blank">[82]</a>. To score for suppression of the extra seam cell phenotype, <i>let-7</i> mutants expressing nuclear GFP in seam cells (<i>let-7(n2853)</i>;<i>Int[scm::GFP]</i>) were grown at the restrictive temperature (25<b>°</b>C) on bacteria expressing dsRNA against candidate targets and the vector control. The number of seam cell nuclei was counted in a population of 20 worms evaluated against the same size population concurrently grown on the empty vector control. RNAi clones that resulted in worm populations with significantly lower seam cell numbers (p<0.05) were retested and scored using a population of at least 20 worms. (B) Suppressors of the extra seam cell nuclei phenotype in <i>let-7(n2853)</i> (p-value<0.05) are shown by bubble plot. Each bubble indicates the number of seam cell nuclei per worm for a population (n≥20) and the size of each bubble is proportional to the number of the animals in the population with a given seam cell number. * p<0.05, ** p<0.01, *** p<0.0001 in two independent trials.