摘要：

Crosses between members of two independent collections of Paramecium tetraurelia mutants blocked in the final membrane fusion step of trichocyst release (nd mutants) allowed us to define 13 complementation groups comprising 23 alleles. The mutant nd9 " was then used as a target in a mutagenesis experiment designed to screen both revertants and new mutants in order to identify interacting genes. This mutant was chosen because it is the best known of its class to date and seems to be altered in assembly of the material connecting the trichocyst membrane to the plasma membrane and in assembly of the "rosette, " a complex array of intramembranous particles in the plasma membrane at the trichocyst insertion sites. No revertants were obtained but two new mutants deficient for rosette assembly were identified, nd16 ' and nd18, whose gene products appear to interact with that of nd9. Indeed, the double mutants grown at 18", a permissive temperature for each of the single mutants, are characterized by a deficiency in exocytosis and in rosette assembly, as are also double mutants combining other allelic forms of the same genes. Moreover, aberrant dominance relationships among alleles of nd9 and of nd16 indicate the existence of interactions between identical subunits, which most likely assemble into multimeric structures. The nd16 gene product was shown

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