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A quantitative genetic approach towards volatile anesthetic mechanisms in C. elegans
B van Swinderen1, A Galifianakis, C M Crowder
1Department of Anesthesiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO 63110, USA. crowderm@morpheus.wustl.edu
Abstract:
Quantitative genetics is the study of the heritability of continuous traits such as height or IQ. Quantitative trait loci (QTLs) represent the genes that are responsible for these quantitative traits. Sensitivity to the volatile anesthetic halothane is a genetically controlled quantitative trait in the nematode C. elegans. The QTLs that are responsible for the 12-fold range in halothane EC50 in these strains map to a few places with at least one major effect locus on chromosome V. Congenic strains for chromosome V confirmed these loci and offer the means to finely map them for positional cloning.