Identification of Insertion Site by RESDA-PCR in Chlamydomonas Mutants Generated by AphVIII Random Insertional...

Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is frequently used as a model organism to study fundamental processes in photosynthesis, metabolism, and flagellar biology. Versatile tool boxes have been developed for this alga ( Fuhrmann et al., 1999 ; Schroda et al., 2000 ; Schroda, 2006). Among them, forward genetic approach has been intensively used, mostly because of the high efficiency in the generation of hundreds of thousands of mutants by random insertional mutagenesis and the haploid nature therefore phenotypic analysis can be done in the first generation ( Cagnon et al., 2013 ; Tunçay et al., 2013 ). A major bottleneck in the application of high throughput methods in a forward genetic approach is the identification of the genetic lesion(s) responsible for the observed phenotype. In this protocol, we describe in detail an improved version of the restriction enzyme site-directed amplification PCR (RESDA-PCR) originally reported in (González- Ballester et al., 2005 ). The improvement includes optimization of primer combination, the choice of DNA polymerase, optimization of PCR cycle parameters, and application of direct sequencing of the PCR products. These modifications make it easier to get specific PCR products as well as speeding up subcloning steps to obtain sequencing data faster.