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Stability of monocentric and dicentric ring minichromosomes in Arabidopsis

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Abstract

A dicentric ring minichromosome (miniδ) was identified in transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana and added to a wild type as a supernumerary chromosome. This line is relatively stable and has been maintained for generations, notwithstanding its ring and dicentric structure. To determine the mechanism for stable transmission of miniδ, the structure and behavior of two new types of ring minichromosomes (miniδ1 and miniδ1-1) derived from miniδ were investigated. Fluorescence in situ hybridization analysis revealed that miniδ1 is dicentric just like miniδ, whereas miniδ1-1 is monocentric. The estimated sizes of miniδ1 and miniδ1-1 were 3.8~5.0 and 1.7 Mb, respectively. The sizes of the two centromeres on miniδ1 were identical (ca. 270 kb) and similar to that of miniδ1-1 (ca. 250 kb). Miniδ1 was relatively stable during mitosis and meiosis, as is miniδ, whereas miniδ1-1 was unstable during mitosis, and the number of minichromosomes per cell varied. This possibly resulted from misdivision caused by a short centromere on monocentric miniδ1-1. Transmission through the female was quite limited for all three ring minichromosomes (0–3.2%), whereas that through the male was relatively high (15.4–27.3%) compared with that of other supernumerary chromosomes in Arabidopsis. Ring structure without telomeres itself seems not to limit the female transmission.

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Abbreviations

BAC:

bacterial artificial chromosome

CENH3:

centromere-specific histone H3

FISH:

fluorescence in situ hybridization

Mb:

megabase pair

PCR:

polymerase chain reaction

PMC:

pollen mother cell

WT:

wild-type

PFGE:

pulsed-field gel electrophoresis

SBH:

Southern blot hybridization

MI:

Metaphase I

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to K. Kashihara for technical assistance. This work was supported by Promotion of Basic Research Activities for Innovative Biosciences, BRAIN, Japan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Plant Science and Resources, Okayama University, 2-20-1 Chuo, Kurashiki, 710-0046, Japan

    Etsuko Yokota, Fukashi Shibata, Kiyotaka Nagaki & Minoru Murata

Authors
  1. Etsuko Yokota
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  2. Fukashi Shibata
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  3. Kiyotaka Nagaki
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  4. Minoru Murata
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Minoru Murata.

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Responsible Editor: Pat Heslop-Harisson.

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Table S1

DNA probes for FISH and their primer set and templates for PCR amplification (DOC 36 kb)

Table S2

Primers designed from the F3C11 BAC sequence for amplifying the fused region with the ATH180F (Table S1) primer, and size of PCR fragments (DOC 29.5 kb)

Table S3

Centromere sizes of three minichromosomes, estimated by direct FISH probed with the 180-bp repeats and Adobe Photoshop 5 Extended (DOC 48 kb)

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Yokota, E., Shibata, F., Nagaki, K. et al. Stability of monocentric and dicentric ring minichromosomes in Arabidopsis . Chromosome Res 19, 999–1012 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10577-011-9250-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10577-011-9250-3

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