Lethal, laggard and flowering time variants in generations following thymidine analogue treatment of Arabidopsis buds

Abstract

More recently, it has been shown that I125-labelled IUdR applied to premeiotic buds of Arabidopsis becomes incorporated selectively into nuclei of gametophytic cells (BROWN and SMITH, 1964). Such incorporation into DNA of cells which are progenitors of gametes is a prerequisite for the production of sexually transmissable genetic change in higher plants that can be attributed to the proposed mechanism of base pair substitution following analogue replacement of thymidine in DNA (FREESE, 1963). Our observations on Arabidopsis thaliana progeny populations derived from plants treated with 5-iodo or 5-bromodeoxyuridine, (IUdR or BUdR), were aimed at detecting any visible changes due to genetic alteration induced by such treatments. Deviations from the control populations were readily discernable under the uniform conditions of growth obtained.