Nature of insertion sequences in additional mutable alleles recovered from Mutator backgrounds

Nature of insertion sequences in additional mutable alleles recovered from Mutator backgrounds --Christine Warren, Anne Britt and Virginia Walbot Since 1982 we have recovered a number of somatically unstable mutants in the anthocyanin pathway by crossing Robertson's purple Mutator stock with individual recessive testers. Using Southern hybridization in which the mutable is compared side-by-side to its progenitor we have succeeded in identifying the types of elements inserted at several alleles this past year. The c2-mu1 allele we reported in 1985 (Walbot et al. in Genetics, Development & Evolution, edited by J. P. Gustafson, et al., p. 115) contains a 1.4 kb Mu element within the coding region. Two 1988 isolates, bz1-mu3 and bz2-mu3, also contain 1.4 kb Mu elements within the transcription unit. Three a2 mutables and bz2-mu4 have been shown to contain insertions, but their nature is unknown; we have ruled out the presence of 1.4 kb and 1.7 kb Mu elements. Further tests are in progress to determine whether these contain examples of the other types of Mu elements or whether these alleles contain insertions from a different transposable element family.

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