Genetics of reproductive isolation in Arabidopsis

描述（由申请人提供）：转基因作物的基因传播到相关野生物种或同一作物的非转基因植物中，是许多国家人们日益关注的问题。这种担忧部分是基于对环境的担忧，也出于对人类健康意想不到的潜在副作用的担忧。防止不必要的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。这需要一个简单的基因不相容。野生种群是鉴定对亲本株系无害的潜在杂交屏障的一个重要且尚未开发的资源。在此，我建议绘制和鉴定导致两个拟南芥生态型温敏杂交不育的两个基因。一旦确定了这些菌株不相容的基因，我将使用转基因和基因敲除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杂交中引发无活力表型。我还将分析不亲和性等位基因的种群动态和分子进化，以探讨它们对亲本菌株是否具有适应价值。

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.