An alternate hypothesis to explain the high frequency of "revertants" in hothead mutants in Arabidopsis.

Department of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology, Iowa State University, Molecular Biology Building, Ames, IA 50011, USA. kln@iastate.edu

Plant biology (Stuttgart, Germany) 2007 Jan

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Lolle et al. reported a high frequency of genomic changes in ARABIDOPSIS plants carrying the hothead mutation and proposed that the changes observed were the result of a gene correction system mediated by a hypothetical RNA cache. Here, we propose a very different hypothesis to explain the data reported by Lolle et al. Our hypothesis is based on a relatively straightforward developmental aberration in which maternal cells ("Legacy cells") fuse with the developing embryo, resulting in a chimera, which could then give rise to the aberrant genetic segregations reported by Lolle et al.

Citation

L Krishnaswamy, T Peterson. An alternate hypothesis to explain the high frequency of "revertants" in hothead mutants in Arabidopsis. Plant biology (Stuttgart, Germany). 2007 Jan;9(1):30-1