How to map ses, a mutant of Arabidopsis thaliana affecting pollen development.

In Arabidopsis, map-based cloning has been developed to an effective method in mutant genetic analysis because high-density markers are available, candidate genes or genomic sequences can be amplified by PCR and transgenic techniques are simplified. Mutant ses named from shortened early-stage siliques was used as an example to show how to map a mutant in this day. By the process of bulked segregants analysis, linkage testing, large-scale and fine scale mapping, mutant ses was narrowed into a 67 kb interval from CER448792 (2000541 bp) to CER464544 (2067844 bp) crossing over the right of BAC F12K11 to the left of the BAC F4H5 including at most 22 putative genes on the top of chromosome l. In sequence-based map of Arabidopsis genes with Mutant phenotype (SMAGMP) mutant ses was between ATlg06150 (EMB1444) and ATlg08060 (MOM). The SES mapping also showed that developed markers on polymorphism site of CAPC not only were simplified and but worked well. 24 markers from CAPC used in the mapping maybe help Arabidopsis researches with others and the methods related to SES mapping also gave an example of positional cloning.

Transgenic plants expressing autoantigens fed to mice to induce oral immune tolerance.

Oral administration of protein can induce antigen-specific immune hyporesponsiveness. However, the utility of oral tolerance to autoantigens in the treatment of autoimmune diseases may be limited when candidate autoantigens cannot be produced by conventional systems in quantities sufficient for clinical studies. Plants may be ideally suited for this purpose, as they can synthesize, glycosylate and assemble mammalian proteins to provide huge quantities of relatively low cost soluble proteins. Furthermore, edible transgenic plants could provide a simple and direct method of autoantigen delivery for oral tolerance. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine whether a transgenic plant expression system was capable of synthesizing the diabetes-associated autoantigen, glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD) in an immunogenic form and whether the oral administration of an autoantigen expressed by a plant could directly induce protective immune responses in a mouse model of diabetes. We show that a GAD-expressing transgenic plant, given as a dietary supplement, inhibits the development of diabetes in the non-obese diabetic (NOD) mouse.