HIGH RATES OF OCCURRENCE OF SPONTANEOUS CHROMOSOME ABERRATIONS IN DROSOPHILA MELANOGASTER

Spontaneous mutations were accumulated for 40 generations in 140 unrelated second chromosomes with the standard gene arrangement. These were extracted from the same population by using the marked inversion technique, and the following findings were obtained: (1) In 42 out of the 140 chromosome lines, chromosome aberrations were detected by examining the salivary gland chromosomes: 40 paracentric and 15 pericentric inversions, 2 reciprocal translocations between the second and the third chromosomes, and 6 transpositions. (2) In 63 out of the 90 originally lethal-free lines, recessive lethal mutations occurred. (3) There were only 3 lines that acquired chromosome aberrations (inversions) with no lethal effects in the homozygous condition. (4) In a comparison of these results with those of the (CH), (PQ), and (RT) chromosomes in which no chromosome aberrations occurred after accumulating mutations for 22058 chromosome·generations (Yamaguchi and Mukai 1974), it was concluded that some of these 140 chromosomes carried a kind of mutator. (5) The frequency of mutator-carrying chromosome lines was estimated to be 0.66 on the basis of the distribution of the break-points on the chromosome lines and the frequency of lines that acquired neither recessive lethal mutations nor chromosome aberrations. Thus, the average number of breaks per mutator-carrying chromosome was estimated to be about 0.19/generation. On the basis of these estimates, the nature of the mutator factor was discussed.