Identification and characterization of a polymorphic receptor kinase gene linked to the self-incompatibility locus of Arabidopsis lyrata

We study the segregation of variants of a putative self-incompatibility gene in Arabidopsis lyrata. This gene encodes a sequence that is homologous to the protein encoded by the SRK gene involved in self-incompatibility in Brassica species. We show by diallel pollinations of plants in several full-sib families that seven different sequences of the gene in A. lyrata are linked to different S-alleles, and segregation analysis in further sibships shows that four other sequences behave as allelic to these. The family data on incompatibility provide evidence for dominance classes among the S-alleles, as expected for a sporophytic SI system. We observe no division into pollen-dominant and pollen-recessive classes of alleles as has been found in Brassica, but our alleles fall into at least three dominance classes in both pollen and stigma expression. The diversity among sequences of the A. lyrata putative S-alleles is greater than among the published Brassica SRK sequences, and, unlike Brassica, the alleles do not cluster into groups with similar dominance.