Characterizing the process of recovery in Heterorhabditis bacteriophora was done by
identifying genes that are putatively involved in this process. For this purpose, a large scale bioassay
for recovery was established and two subtraction libraries of recovered IJs subtracted by arrested IJs
were constructed. Six hundreds expressed sequence tags (ESTs) were sequenced and annotated
resulting in 300 useful ESTs that were compared to the C. elegans Wormbase and categorized into
functional categories according to gene ontology. Of these, twenty three genes were chosen for further
analysis. These genes were examined for their expression in the recovery process by quantitative (q)
RT-PCR. The results of the RT-qPCR supported the results obtained from the subtraction libraries.
Further analysis to these genes is being done by RNAi-based functional analysis in H. bacteriophora.