Summary
Polyethylene glycol-induced artificial fusions were made between gametes of opposite mating-type defective in sexual copulation capacity, and the inheritance patterns of chloroplast genes were analysed. Gametogenesis in non-agglutinating mutant strains was verified by a recently developed assay system (Saito et al. 1988) which distinguishes between the vegetative cell and the gamete. Although sexual crosses leading to the formation of vegetative zygotes (diploids) occurred very rarely in non-fusing mutant strain imp-1, gametes of non-agglutinating mutant strains, imp-2 and agl-1, did not fuse to form vegetative zygotes. The artificial fusions gave rise to diploid products which preferentially transmitted the chloroplast genes from the mating-type plus gamete. Non-motile cells grown on nitrogen-free agar plates — a cell type used as “gametes” by Matagne (1981) in artificial fusion experiments which exhibited patterns of chloroplast gene transmission very different from ours (Matsuda et al. 1983; this paper) — can be classified as vegetative, but not as gametic, as defined by the assay system. We demonstrate that even gametes, when placed on solid nitrogen-free medium, de-differentiate into vegetative cells and, after suspension in a liquid medium, differentiate once again into gametes.
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Matsuda, Y., Saito, T., Umemoto, T. et al. Transmission patterns of chloroplast genes after polyethylene glycol-induced fusion of gametes in non-mating mutants of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii . Curr Genet 14, 53–58 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00405854
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00405854