XVI International Botanical Congess

Of the mutations affecting the development of the compound pea leaf, unifoliata is one of the most dramatic reducing the compound leaf to a single leaf blade. UNI is found to be the pea FLO/LFY homolog. In order to identify other genes involved in compound pea leaf development, we are looking for proteins that interact with the promoter of UNI. A 1.3 kb fragment of the UNI promoter has been isolated. By Southern analysis, a weaker allele of uni, known as unitac, was found to contain an insertion in the promoter region. This mutant promoter was also cloned, sequenced and by comparison with the wildtype promoter the insertion was found to represent a retrotransposon. Another difference between the mutant and wildtype promoter was the presence of two copies of a direct 9 bp repeat in the wildtype promoter whereas the unitac promoter lacks one copy. This direct repeat was used to design an oligo, which has been found to bind nuclear proteins.