Analysis of the meiotic recombination frequency in transgenic tomato hybrids expressing recA and NLS-recA-licBM3 genes

To study and induce meiotic recombination in plants, we generated and analyzed transgenic tomato hybrids F1-RecA and F1-NLS-recA-LicBM3 expressing, respectively, the recA gene of Escherichia coli and the NLS-recA-licBM3 gene. It was found that the recA and NLS-recA-licBM3 genes are inherited through the maternal and paternal lineages, they have no selective influence on the pollen and are contained in tomato F1-RecA and F1-NLS-RecA-LicBM3 hybrids outside the second chromosome in the hemizygous state. The comparative analysis of the meiotic recombination frequency (rf) in the progenies of the transgenic and nontransgenic hybrids showed that only the expression of the recA gene of E. coli in cells of the F1-RecA plants produced a 1.2–1.5-fold increase in the frequency of recombination between some linked marker genes of the second chromosome of tomato.