Frances Goglio with Dr. Richard Amasino & Scott Woody

UW-Madison Department of Biochemistry

The B3 Brassica Rapa line was created by six generations of intercrossing between Wisconsin Fast Plant, IMB, and Ceres lines. Ethyl methane sulfonate (or EMS) was used to create mutations in Brassica Rapa plants. These mutants were self-pollinated so that recessive mutant phenotypes would begin to show in the following generation. When mutations were found in the second-generation plants, they were then backcrossed to the wild type Brassica rapa to eliminate any mutations in the line that were not responsible for the mutant phenotype. The mutants were also self-pollinated to increase the number of plants with the mutant phenotype, as well as to determine whether the mutant phenotype was due to a dominant or recessive gene. When multiple plants showed evidence of the same mutation, they were given a complementation test to determine whether the phenotype was caused by the same base pair mutation or different base pair mutations.