Radiation Biology of Structurally Different Drosophila melanogaster Genes. Message 9. General Regularities and Locus-Specific Features of Radiomutability of Sex-Linked and Autosomal Genes

The results of large-scale radiation, genetic, cytogenetic and molecular genetic studies on the nature and frequency of heritable mutations of two sex-linked and three autosomal genes of Drosophila melanogaster after exposure to ⁶⁰Co γ-rays and 0.85 MeV neutrons are presented. Regularities were established for studied genes and radiations in the induction of five different types of recessively inherited mutations, which can be combined into two main classes - the class of chromosomal mutations in one way or another affecting the gene under study (changes leading to sterility of F₁ mutants, multilocus deletions, inversion or translocation breakpoint chromosome in the region of gene localization) and a class of “point” gene mutations with a complex spectrum of DNA changes detected by PCR and sequencing. In this report, the results of classical genetic and cytogenetic analysis of these classes of mutations are considered in detail and the frequency of their induction by γ-rays or neutrons is estimated per locus per dose unit (1 Gy). An important and unexpected result of the assessment was the fact that the frequency of “point” mutations turned out to be invariant (on average 1.15 E-06/locus/Gy) for the studied genes and radiations, in contrast to chromosomal mutations, where a pronounced locus-specificity is observed for individual types of mutations. At the same time, neutrons are two or more times more effective than γ-rays in inducing this class of mutations. It is significant that the ave-rage frequency of “point” mutations induction correlates with the average cDNA length of these genes (1.62 kb), but not with their average size (6.07 kb), indicating that the target for " point mutations is, obviously, not the entire DNA of the gene, but only the informational part of its exons. The dependence of the frequency of chromosomal mutations of one type or another on the position of the gene on the chromosome and in the three-dimensional space of the genome is discussed.