Received May 15, 2002
Accepted September 10, 2002
A High-Throughput Arabidopsis Reverse Genetics System
Allen Sessions 1*, Ellen Burke 1, Gernot Presting 1, George Aux 2, John McElver 2, David Patton 2, Bob Dietrich 2, Patrick Ho 1, Johana Bacwaden 1, Cynthia Ko 1, Joseph D. Clarke 1, David Cotton 1, David Bullis 1, Jennifer Snell 1, Trini Miguel 1, Don Hutchison 1, Bill Kimmerly 1, Theresa Mitzel 3, Fumiaki Katagiri 1, Jane Glazebrook 1, Marc Law 2, and Stephen A. Goff 1
1
Torrey Mesa Research Institute, Syngenta, 3115 Merryfield Row, San Diego, California
92121
2
Syngenta Biotechnology Incorporated, 3054 Cornwallis Road, Research Triangle Park,
North Carolina 27709
3
Syngenta Seeds Incorporated, 7240 Holsclaw Road, Gilroy, California 95020
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: allen.sessions{at}syngenta.com.
A collection of Arabidopsis lines with T-DNA insertions in known sites was generated
to increase the efficiency of functional genomics. A high-throughput modified thermal
assymetric inter laced (TAIL)-PCR protocol was developed and used to amplify DNA
fragments flanking the T-DNA left borders from
100,000 transformed lines. A
total of 85,108 TAIL-PCR products from 52,964 T-DNA lines were sequenced and compared
with the Arabidopsis genome to determine the positions of T-DNAs in each line. Predicted
T-DNA insertion sites, when mapped, showed a bias against predicted coding sequences.
Predicted insertion mutations in genes of interest can be identified using Arabidopsis
Gene Index name searches or by BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) search.
Insertions can be confirmed by simple PCR assays on individual lines. Predicted insertions
were confirmed in 257 of 340 lines tested (76%). This resource has been named SAIL
(Syngenta Arabidopsis Insertion Library) and is available to the scientific community
at www.tmri.org.