• Korean Journal of Plant Tissue Culture
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.245-250
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• 1999

Plantlets derived from leaf blade-segment culture of a variegated tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L. cv. BY-4) that was induced by a heavy-ion ($^{14}N$) beam irradiation to proembryos, were characterized. When explants from both white and green sections of leaves of the variegated plant were cultured on MS medium containing 0.1 mg/L NAA and 1.0 mg/L BAP, the white sections yielded only white shoots, whereas the green sections generated approximately 47.2% green, 37.4% white and 15.4% variegated shoots. In the F1 generation of a green tobacco derived from the leaf blade-segment culture, the segregation ratio of green to white was 1,651:54. Furthermore, reciprocal crosses showed that all of the progenies was green, indicating that the variegation is not maternally inherited. When the signal intensity of photosynthesis genes was determined by DNA gel blot analysis using the variegated leaves derived from green sections of variegated leaves, there were more of the rbcL, psbA, 16S rDNA and 23S rDNA chloroplast genes in the white sections than the chloroplast genes in wild type and green sections of the variegated plants.