Plant Science Colloquium with Dr. Caroline Marcon

Genome-wide insertional mutagenesis is a tool to create loss-of-function mutations for virtually all genes in a genome. The European mutant collection BonnMu utilizes Mutator (Mu) transposons to generate insertional mutations for functional genetics in maize. As such, Mu-induced maize mutants are used for reverse and forward genetics experiments to identify and characterize novel mutants regulating various developmental processes. For the BonnMu kick-off study, we constructed and sequenced two Mu-insertional libraries, covering 1,152 Mu-tagged F2-families in B73 inbred background. Insertions affected 16,392 of 44,117 (37%) genes of the maize genome. Downstream analysis revealed that the vast majority of BonnMu transposons was inserted near the transcription start site of genes, corresponding to open chromatin regions. The BonnMu resource is still expanding and meanwhile 70% of all maize genes are tagged.....