OLIGONUCLEOTIDE FINGERPRINTING OF RESYNTHESIZED BRASSICA-NAPUS

Brassica napus plants, artificially synthesized through somatic hybrid ization of B. oleracea and B campestris protoplasts, were analyzed by oligonucleotide fingerprinting. While the fingerprint patterns of the different hybrid plants looked very much alike, they did not simply re present a combination of the parental patterns. Instead, the absence o f parental bands as well as the presence of new bands suggest that eli mination and/or rearrangements occurred during or after the fusion of the two genomes. The fingerprints of individual F1 progeny plants of s elfed hybrids did not detect major changes. Thus, once formed, the art ifically resynthesized amphidiploid B. napus genome appears to be stab le. Taken together, our experiments demonstrate the usefulness of olig onucleotide fingerprinting for the characterization of artificial hybr ids in the genus Brassica.