Cost-effective profiling of mutator transposon insertions in maize by next-generation sequencing

Abstract

Transposable elements can be highly mutagenic because when they transpose they can insert into genes and disrupt their function, a propensity which has been exploited in many organisms to generate tagged mutant alleles. The Mutator (Mu) family transposon is a family of DNA-type transposons in maize with a particularly high duplication frequency, which results in large numbers of new mutations in lineages that carry active Mu elements. Here we describe a rapid and cost-effective Miseq-based Mu transposon profiling pipeline. This method can also be used for identifying flanking sequences of other types of long insertions such as T-DNAs.