Effect of heterozygous deletions on dosage compensation in Arabidopsis thaliana
Heterozygous deletions are often produced by the induction of mutations, which can include a large number of genes. To assess the effect of heterozygous deletions on phenotypic changes, the induction of gene dosage compensation should be considered. This mechanism is normally known to balance the expression levels of genes with different copy numbers in sex chromosomes, but is also known to operate in autosomes. In this study, three A. thaliana mutants with heterozygous deletions were produced by heavy-ion beam irradiation. The sizes of the deletions ranged from 454 kb to 1.29 Mb, and the number of deleted genes ranged from 16 to 76.