| abstract |
Disclosed are a number of physical or chemical treatments that increase the frequency of recombination in a plant. These treatments act to either cause DNA damage or modifications, affect chromatin structure, or affect the recombination machinery in the cell. Increases in the frequency of recombination are useful for improving a number of manipulations with plants including traditional plant breeding to form hybrids, self-pollinating plants in order to eliminate undesirable traits, introgression of a single trait from one plant line into another, generating novel mutations with novel desired phenotypes, genetic mapping experiments, and generation of transgenic plants by transformation with exogenous genetic material. Both homologous and non-homologous recombination frequencies are increased, as well as an increased frequency of recombination during meiosis and mitosis. |