HEALING OF BROKEN LINEAR DICENTRIC CHROMOSOMES IN YEAST

James E. Haber ¹ and Patricia C. Thorburn ²

¹ Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts 02254
² Department of Biology, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts 02254

In yeast, meiotic recombination between a linear chromosome III and a haploid-viable circular chromosome will yield a dicentric, tandemly duplicated chromosome. Spores containing apparently intact dicentric chromosomes were recovered from tetrads with three viable spores. The spore containing the dicentric inherited URA3 (part of the recombinant DNA used to join regions near the ends of the chromosome into a circle) as well as HML, HMR and MAL2 (located near the two ends of a linear but deleted from the circle). The Ura⁺ Mal⁺ colonies were highly variegated, giving rise to as many as seven distinctly different stable ("healed") derivatives, some of which were Ura⁺ Mal ⁺, others Ura⁺ Mal^- and others Ura ^- Mal⁺. The colonies were also sectored for five markers (HIS4, LEU2, CRY1, MAT and THR4) initially heterozygous in the tandemly duplicated dicentric chromosome.—Southern blot and genetic analyses have demonstrated that these stable derivatives arose from mitotic break-age of the dicentric chromosome, followed by one of several different healing events. The majority of the stable derivatives contained circular or linear chromosomes apparently resulting from homologous recombination between a broken chromosome end and a homologous region on the other end of the original dicentric duplicated chromosome. A smaller proportion of events resulted in apparently uniquely healed linear chromosomes in which the broken chromosome acquired a new telomere. In two instances we recovered chromosome III partially duplicated with a novel right end. We have also found one derivative that had also experienced rearrangement of repeated DNA sequences found adjacent to yeast telomeres.

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