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The
Sainsbury Laboratory and John Innes Centre have become the first training
centre in Europe offering a new biotechnological approach to isolating
plant mutants. This technology, pioneered by Steve Henikoff and his group
in Seattle, has been adapted in a collaboration between the two Norwich
institutes for discovering mutants in known genes of the model legume,
Lotus japonicus, a member of the legume
family of plants.
The technology, known as TILLING (Targeting Induced Local Lesions IN Genomes) is a 'reverse genetics' process and relies on the ability of a special enzyme to detect mismatches in normal and mutant DNA strands when they are annealed. The enzyme, CEL1, an endonuclease that can be isolated readily from celery, has the ability to detect when the two strands of DNA do not align correctly upon forming duplexes because of the difference in sequence. It can detect, therefore, single point mutations of the type induced by chemicals conventionally used in mutation breeding programmes.
Lotus
japonicus Homepage
John
Innes Homepage