| o find the genetic determinants that play important role in plant survival in environmental stresses, with the ultimate goal of improving stress tolerance of crops, a novel molecular genetic approach was proposed to directly identify genes that are essential in stress defense. The proposed strategy is to identify Arabidopsis thaliana mutants that are hypersensitive to stress, since mutations in genes that are essential for plant to cope with stresses would result in the hypersensitive phenotypes.;Several stress-hypersensitive mutants were selected from an ethylmethane sulfonate mutagenized seed pool. Among them, sos1 (salt-overly-sensitive) and hit1 (hit-intolerant) mutants were intensely studied. sos1 does not show phenotypic changes at normal growth conditions. Its root growth however is 20 times more sensitive to Na;hit1 mutant was isolated as its seed germination and seedling maturation were 2 to 3;Genetic analysis indicated that both sos1 and hit1 mutant phenotypes display single recessive Mendelian inheritance. Genome position of sos1 was currently mapped to chromosome 2 at 29... |
