Activation tagging, a novel tool to dissect the functions of a gene family.

抄録

In a screen for morphological mutants from the T1 generation of approximately 50,000 activation tagging lines, we isolated four dominant mutants that showed hyponastic leaves. We designated them isoginchaku (iso). The iso-1D and iso-2D are allelic mutants caused by activation of the AS2 gene. Iso-3D and iso-4D are another allelic mutants caused by activation of the ASL1/LBD36 gene. These two genes belong to the AS2/Lateral organ boundaries gene family that is composed of 42 genes in Arabidopsis. The only recessive mutation isolated from this gene family was of AS2. Applying reverse genetics using a database of activation tagged T-DNA flanking sequences we found a dominant mutant that we designated peacock1-D (pck1-D) in which the ASL5/LBD12 gene was activated by a T-DNA. These results strongly suggest that activation tagging is a powerful mutant mining tool especially for genes that make up a gene family.