Ds Transposon Mutant Lines for Saturation Mutagenesis of the Arabidopsis genome

Analysis of genetic mutations is one of the most effective techniques for investigating gene function.We now have methods that allow for mass production of mutant lines and cells created by gene disruption or silencing in model organisms, and great progress is being made in the use of those tools for comprehensive phenotypic analysis. In plants, insertion mutations can be produced using T-DNA or transposons, making it possible to monitor the effects of a defect in a single gene. Through bulk storage of mutations in the form of seeds, which is not an option in animal models, it is now feasible to use insertion mutations to analyze every gene in a model plant genome, especially Arabidopsis. This makes Arabidopsis useful not only as a model organism for plant research, but also as the only multicellular organism in which it is currently possible to perform "saturation mutagenesis" to create knockout strains for every gene. Transposon-tagged lines are generated as a gene knockout mutant resource for a wide variety of functional genomics studies in model plants. This chapter introduces a mutagenesis method using the transposon Ac/Ds system.