Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2007 Dec;177(4):2535-9.
doi: 10.1534/genetics.107.074765.

The role of double-stranded break repair in the creation of phenotypic diversity at cereal VRN1 loci

James Cockram  1 , Ian J Mackay, Donal M O'Sullivan
Affiliations

The role of double-stranded break repair in the creation of phenotypic diversity at cereal VRN1 loci

James Cockram et al. Genetics. 2007 Dec.

Abstract

Nonhomologous repair of double-stranded breaks, although fundamental to the maintenance of genomic integrity in all eukaryotes, has received little attention as to its evolutionary consequences in the generation and selection of phenotypic diversity. Here we document the role of illegitimate recombination in the creation of novel alleles in VRN1 orthologs selected to confer adaptation to annual cropping systems in barley and wheat.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

F<sc>igure</sc> 1.—
Figure 1.—
Nucleotide sequence alignments flanking deletions in spring and winter alleles of orthologous cereal VRN1 genes. (A) Promoter and intron deletions exhibiting short flanking repeat motifs precisely flanking the breakpoint with no filler sequence. (B) Intron I deletions where flanking repeats are interspersed with short flanking filler sequences (double underscored). The probability (p) that short sequence repeat motifs flank deletion breakpoints is adapted from the methods described by Devos et al. (2002): the number of times the short sequence repeat occurs within intron I of the reference winter allele is divided by the number of possible sequences of identical length within the intron. Where a repeat motif starts at the nth nucleotide following the breakpoint rather than the first, the probability is multiplied by n to correct. Deletions within the promoter are indicated by dashed lines; intron I deletions are indicated by dashed lines, separated by a gap of indicated size. Short sequence repeats flanking deletion boundaries are boxed in gray. Transposable elements (TEs) are boxed by dashed lines. Conserved 5′ breakpoints in spring alleles from barley and wheat are indicated by arrowed lines. W, winter allele; S, spring allele; TE insertion footprint is indicated by an asterisk. The position of TE insertion events in wheat and barley are indicated by solid and shaded triangles, respectively. The single dagger indicates flanking repeats in D-genome spring allele noted by Fu et al. (2005).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Bennetzen, J. L., 2000. Transposable element contributes to plant gene and genome evolution. Plant Mol. Biol. 42: 251–269. - PubMed
    1. Bennetzen, J. L., 2007. Patterns in grass genome evolution. Curr. Opin. Plant Biol. 10: 176–181. - PubMed
    1. Bennetzen, J. L., J. Ma and K. M. Devos, 2005. Mechanisms of recent genome size variation in flowering plants. Annals of Bot. 95: 127–132. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Cockram, J., E. Chiapparino, K. Stamati, S. A. Taylor, P. Donini et al., 2007. Haplotype analysis of vernalization loci in European barley germplasm reveals novel VRN-H1 alleles and a predominant winter VRN-H1/VRN-H2 multilocus haplotype. Theor. Appl. Genet. 115: 993–1001. - PubMed
    1. Devos, K. M., J. K. M. Brown and J. L. Bennetzen, 2002. Genome size reduction through illegitimate recombination counteracts genome expansion in Arabidopsis. Genome Res. 12: 1075–1079. - PMC - PubMed