PAG-II Plant Genome II Conference

Town & Country Conference Center, San Diego, CA, January, 1994.


PG-II: HIGHER LEVEL OF RECOMBINATION IN WHEAT IS DUE TO MORE CROSS-OVERS/ARM AND LOCALIZED RECOMBINATION HOT-SPOTS

HIGHER LEVEL OF RECOMBINATION IN WHEAT IS DUE TO MORE CROSS-OVERS/ARM AND LOCALIZED RECOMBINATION HOT-SPOTS.

Kulvinder Gill and Bikram Gill, Wheat Genetic Resource Center, Department of Plant Pathology, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS-66506.


Contrary to the popular belief, recombination in wheat and its related species is more than 1-2 cross-overs/arm. The total genetic length of our RFLP genetic linkage map of Triticum tauschii, the D-genome progenitor of wheat, is 3479 cM with an average of about 500 cM/chromosome. The genetic length increases uniformly with increased number of markers, with an average of 20 cM/marker. The genetic distance/chromosome varies from 265 cM (4D) to 671 cM (5D). These two chromosomes have 26 and 60 markers, respectively. We investigated the reasons for higher levels of recombination in wheat (Triticum aestivum) using chromosome deletion lines to precisely determine physical distance among the markers, and chromosome 5B recombinant population using 5B substitution line from Triticum dicoccoides). The 5B substitution line was crossed to 'CS', the F1 was crossed to mono 5B, and 41 chromosome plants were selected and selfed in order to recover recombinant 5B chromosome in homozygous state. Since there was only one cycle of meiosis followed by fixing the recombinant chromosome in homozygous state, crossing-over in each plant can be seen by arranging the RFLP scoring data in the same order, from centromere toward telomere, as they appear on the physical map. We mapped 12 DNA probes for the long arm of group 5 of wheat. Out of 55 plants, 3 plants have four crossovers, two have three, seven have two, and 17 have single cross-over. We detected two obvious recombination hot-spots. One was around Ph1 gene region where we detected 4 crossovers in a chromosome region that is physically submicroscopic. The second hot-spot is between the probes wg1026 and bcd 450. The two probes are physically present in the chromosome region spanning less than 5% of the arm but has 12 crossovers between the two markers. In addition, 4 gene conversion like events were also observed. Double crossovers were observed in the chromosome region that is genetically only 7-15 cM.


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