An improved method for isolation of mutator mutants from mouse FM3A cells and their characterization.

An improved method to select mutator mutants was developed. By this new method, mutator mutants were isolated efficiently, and 7 mutants were obtained from cultured mouse FM3A cells. These mutator mutants have an elevated rate of spontaneous mutation at 3 genetic loci (resistance to ouabain, blasticidin S, and tunicamycin). The sensitivity of these mutants to aphidicolin and arabinofuranosylcytosine was the same as in the wild-type cells. Determination of the size of the cellular dNTP pool revealed that there was no large imbalance in the precursor pool in the mutator mutants. These results suggested that the mutator character may be due to alteration in some factor(s) correlated directly to DNA replication. Also, there was no change in the sensitivity of all these mutator mutants to DNA damaging agents.