Development of an mPing-based Activation Tag for Crop Insertional Mutagenesis

Crop improvement hinges on functional genomic information. Introduction of mobile genetic elements called transposons into crop species can generate novel mutants, helping plant geneticists determine genes underlying agronomically important traits. Our goals were to improve current transposon-based mutagenesis in soybean by introducing an engineered version of the rice transposon mPing that contains enhancer elements. This engineered mPing element, called mmPing20F served as an activation tag. With this data, we demonstrated the ability of mmping20F to move into regions of the genome containing genes, and that genes in close proximity to insertion sites were up-regulated by the enhancer elements carried by mmPing20F.