Genetics of reproductive isolation in Arabidopsis

描述（申请人提供）：许多国家的人们越来越关注转基因作物向相关野生物种或相同作物的非转基因种植的转基因传播。这种担心部分是基于对环境的担忧，也是对人类健康的意想不到的潜在副作用。防止转基因杂交的一个重要方法是设计对亲本植物或人类消费者无害的遗传屏障。这需要一个简单的遗传不相容性。野生种群是一个重要的和很大程度上未开发的资源，用于确定潜在的杂交障碍，是无害的亲本菌株。我在这里提出的地图和确定两个基因，导致温度敏感的两个拟南芥生态型的杂种不活力。一旦这些菌株的不相容性基因已经确定，我将使用转基因和敲除的方法来阐明潜在的分子机制，并测试我们是否可以在转基因的杂交后代中诱导不存活表型。我也将分析不亲和等位基因的群体动态和分子进化，以询问它们是否对亲本菌株具有适应价值。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): A growing concern among people in many countries is the spread of transgenes from transgenic crop plants to related wild species or nontransgenic plantings of the same crop. This fear is based in part on environmental concerns and also for unexpected potential side effects for human health. An important method for preventing unwanted hybridizing of transgenics will be to engineer genetic barriers that are not detrimental to the parent plants or to human consumers. This would require a simple genetic incompatibility. Wild populations are one important and largely untapped resource for identifying potential hybridization barriers that are not detrimental to parent strains. I propose here to map and identify two genes that cause temperature sensitive hybrid inviability of two Arabidopsis ecotypes. Once genes underlying the incompatibility of these strains have been identified, I will use transgenic and knockout approaches to elucidate the underlying molecular mechanism, and to test the whether we can elicit the inviability phenotype in hybrids of the transgenics. I will also analyze the population dynamics and molecular evolution of the incompatibility alleles to ask whether they have adaptive value to the parental strains.