XVI International Botanical Congess

Ion beams are ionizing radiation which can deposit high energy in a localized area. Due to the specific energy deposition, ion beams are supposed to serve as a new mutagen in plants, providing important implications in classical and molecular genetics. We therefore investigated the nature of mutation induced by carbon ions in Arabidopsis. PCR and Southern blot analyses suggested that deltions and/or rearrangements were frequently induced. Further, sequence and mapping analyses of a gl1 mutant revealed that an inversion and a insertion took place via non homologous end joining of DNA double strand breaks. These results demonstrate that the characteristics of the ion beam-induced mutations is the high frequency of induction of DNA rearrangements in plant genome.