Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, New York 10032, USA. md2398@columbia.edu
We describe an automated method to isolate mutant Caenorhabditis elegans that do not appropriately execute cellular differentiation programs. We used a fluorescence-activated sorting mechanism implemented in the COPAS Biosort machine to isolate mutants with subtle alterations in the cellular specificity of GFP expression. This methodology is considerably more efficient than comparable manual screens and enabled us to isolate mutants in which dopamine neurons do not differentiate appropriately.