INSERTIONAL MUTAGENESIS AND PROMOTER TRAPPING IN PLANTS FOR THE ISOLATION OF GENES AND THE STUDY OF DEVELOPMENT

Insertional mutagenesis, whether by transposable elements or T-DNAs fr om Agrobacterium tumefaciens, provides a powerful experimental strateg y to investigate the genetic basis of plant growth, metabolism and dev elopment. The linkage of an insertion element with a mutant phenotype of interest greatly facilitates the isolation of the wild-type gene. A further refinement of this strategy is the incorporation of promoter traps or enhancer traps into the insertion elements. These can act as functional tags of regulatory elements associated with genes in the ho st genome, potentially can improve further the efficiency of screening for target mutant phenotypes, and may provide valuable markers of spe cific cell types for developmental analysis. We discuss the use of the se techniques to study the molecular genetics of plant development.