Vectors for co-expression of two genes in Caenorhabditis elegans.

To meet the increasing need of simultaneously co-expressing two different genes in the same cell of transgenic Caenorhabditis elegans, here, we report the establishment of dicistronic vectors that contain an intercistronic region (ICR) of the C. elegans operon, CEOP5428. In these vectors, a green fluorescence protein (GFP) and a red FP (RFP) genes were placed in the first and second cistrons, respectively, which were separated by the ICR. Driven by the fibrillarin (fib-1) or myo-2 promoter, the GFP- and RFP-fusion proteins were consistently co-expressed in the entire worm cells or in the pharynx muscle cells of the transgenic worms, respectively. Our work demonstrates that ICR-containing dicistronic vectors could be developed into versatile co-expression systems in C. elegans for functional analysis of genes of interest.