COMPLEMENTATION ANALYSIS OF METABOLITE-RESISTANT MUTATIONS WITH FORCED HETEROKARYONS OF NEUROSPORA CRASSA

The double mutant strain pyr-3 arg-12s is a prototroph because a common precursor of arginine and pyrimidine is supplied by the arginine pathway. Growth of this strain is inhibited by exogenous citrulline or arginine. Citrulline-resistant mutants of this strain were selected, and they resulted from modifier mutations at other loci. Forced heterokaryons were used to study complementation among these modifiers. Since the complementation test requires the scoring of non-growth as the positive result, there was concern that variations in nuclear ratios could give erroneous results. This possibility does not seem significant, since groups of mutants established by complementation correspond with groups established by physiological, enzymatic, and recombinational measurements.—The technique has revealed that the most frequently mutated loci are arg-1 and what is probably un-3. Arg-1 mutations affect the conversion of citrulline to argininosuccinate, while un-3 mutations reduce the citrulline uptake rate. Since most of these mutations are of the intracistronic complementing type, a complementation map was constructed for most of the affected loci. The high proportion of complementors in each map can be explained by assuming that partially functioning gene products are more likely to complement with each other than are those which are nonfunctional.