Abstract
Activation T-DNA tagging produces dominant gain-of-function mutants caused by increased or ectopic expression of endogenous genes by insertion of an enhancers in plant genome. This approach allows discovery of novel genes in which recessive, loss-of-function mutants have no obvious phenotype. In this study, we screened a mutant with oxdative stress resistant from Arabidopsis activation-tagged lines and characterized the genes involved in the stress tolerance. Until now, we generated approximately 8,500-activation tag lines. Among 2,750 lines, two types of mutants (pqr-236 and pqr-242) were isolated, which were resistant to oxidative stress caused by the paraquat treatment at 3.0μM. The pqr-236 mutant showed paraquat-resistant in the T3 generation. T-DNA insertion sites in these mutants were determined by TAIL-PCR. Now, we are determining the transcript levels of genes near the T-DNA and evaluating the contribution of overexpression of the respective gene to the stress tolerance.
