Pleiotropic action of the murine quaking locus: structure of the qkv allele.

The spontaneous allele quakingviable (qkv) exerts effects on myelination and spermiogenesis. The defects generated by qkv were not separated in a multilocus mapping cross that provided a mapping resolution of 0.1 centiMorgans (cM). Furthermore, no distortions suggestive of a large chromosomal anomaly associated with qkv were apparent. One plausible interpretation is that the quaking locus contains more than one functional domain, either organized into overlapping genes or expressed by alternative splicing mechanisms. The cloning needed to analyze this locus will be enhanced by the very high resolution of the meiotic mapping cross reported here. The recombinational distances on this qkv map were compressed compared with those previously reported in a high-resolution map for qkl-1, an embryonic lethal allele of quaking induced by ethylnitrosourea. Additional crosses confirmed prior reports that the sex and the genetic background of the heterozygous parent can affect recombinational distances. These joint effects on recombination are strong enough to account for the discrepancy between the two maps. This variability of two-factor map values leads to the preferred multilocus map-building protocol discussed in the accompanying paper.