Begin preparing the agarose pads by placing a drop of melted 1%agarose onto the vinyl record using a glass Pasteur pipet. Orient a glass slide so that the lines on the record are horizontal or vertical, and place the slide quickly onto the agarose drop for 30 seconds. Remove the glass slide from the record and add approximately five microliters of freshly prepared five millimolar levamisole under the stereoscope.
Gently flick the tube containing worms and transfer 5 to 10 microliters onto the agarose pad to mount the worms. Estimate the number of worms as they are being added so that there are approximately 40 worms per replicate. Line up the worms in rows using an eyelash pick, and place a glass coverslip onto the slide.
Isolate the embryos from the remaining worms using the bleaching protocol and plate 250 embryos onto 35 millimeter NGM plates seeded with OP50-1 bacteria. Under the fluorescent stereoscope, use a GFP filter set and count and record the number of GFP positive and GFP negative worms on the slides for each replicate using a tally counter. The manual scoring of the nuclear GFP signal in the germline for each generation showed that the silencing of the transgene was fully penetrant in the scored P0 and F1 worms treated with GFP RNAi.
In the F2 generation, the proportion of the population exhibiting inheritance of GFP silencing was approximately 50%By the F5 generation, the majority of the population did not show the inheritance of silencing. By the F10 generation, all the worms expressed GFP and no inheritance was detected.
