NOVEL GUS EXPRESSION PATTERNS FOLLOWING TRANSPOSITION OF AN ENHANCER TRAP DS ELEMENT IN ARABIDOPSIS

Enhancer trap derivatives of the maize Dissociation (Ds) transposon we re introduced into Arabidopsis thaliana. The enhancer trap Ds was so d esigned that upon transposition to sites containing regulatory sequenc es in adjacent genomic DNA, transcription of a Ds-borne beta-glucuroni dase (GUS) gene would be activated. Sixty percent of all transposition events were associated with GUS expression patterns including one lin ked to a mutant phenotype. Patterns of GUS expression were found in va rious organs and were stably inheritable in the F-4 and F-5 progenies. These results demonstrate the potential value of the technique as a m eans for detection of developmentally regulated genes and analysis of their function. The enhancer trap construct used in our experiments, a s well as the seeds of primary transformants are publicly available.