Mu killer is a genetic resource for Maize biologists.
Why silence Mutator Activity?
A great advantage of the Mutator transposable element system is its very high frequency of new insertions, making it possible to transposon tag genes with high efficiency. However, after tagging your gene of interest, all of those other new insertions can become a liability. This is particularly true if using a PCR-based strategy (e.g. transposon display) to fish out a cosegregating Mu insertion or to identify heritable (in contrast to somatic) insertions. Ideally, after a mutation is obtained in a Mutator line, activity should be eliminated. If this is done, somatic insertions will be prevented, and the number of Mu elements in the line with the tagged mutation can be rapidly reduced (50% per generation) by outcrossing to any background with a low copy number of Mu elements. Furthermore, suppressible mutations can be rapidly identified (if you loose your mutant phenotype whenever you lose Mutator activity, your mutation may be suppressible).
Description of Mu killer:
Mu killer (Muk) is a single dominant locus responsible for the epigenetic inactivation of the Mutator transposable element family in maize. Muk results in the heritable transcriptional inactivation of MuDR, the autonomous Mutator family transposon. Maize lines with one or many MuDR elements are silenced by Muk, and silencing is not dependent on the position of MuDR elements. Muk is required for the initiation of MuDR silencing, but the inactivated MuDR element is inherited in a silenced state in future generations independent on the presence of Muk.
If you have no idea what the above means, then Mu killer is not for you.
Want to know the who, what, why, when, where and how of Mu killer? Please visit the More Information link.
For more information on how Mu killer silences MuDR, please visit the Publications link.
To see unpublished data on Mu killer, visit the Data link. This page includes data on how efficient a homozygous Muk individual is at silencing a highly Mu-active transposon tagging line, as well as Muk's effect on plant phenotype and how to reduce the copy number of Mutator elements in your line.
For information on how to use Muk to silence Mutator transposons, please click on the Using Mu killer link.
To request Mu killer seed, please visit the Request Seed link.
Search MaizeGDB for Mu killer
Research on Mu killer and the epigenetic silencing of Mutator transposable elements is supported by funding from National Science Foundation award #0321726.
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