Natural variation in yeast RNA polymerase A. Formation of a mosaic RNA polymerase A in a meiotic segregant from an interspecific hybrid.

There is a natural variation in the molecular structure of RNA polymerase A isolated from several genetically distant yeast species, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Saccharomyces douglasii, Schizosaccharomyces pombe, and Candida tropicalis. Several biochemical criteria were used to identify their homologous polypeptide components. Based on these correlations, the minimal subunit composition of S. cerevisiae (and Saccharomyces carlsbergensis) RNA polymerase A was tentatively defined as A190, A135, A40, A27, A23, A19, and A14.5. Without the two Saccharomyces species, S. cerevisiae and S. douglasii, 7 of 13 polypeptides of enzyme A(A49, A43, A40, A34.5, A19, A14.5, and A14) differ slightly in molecular weight and can be resolved by electrophoresis on polyacrylamide gel. The RNA polymerase A isolated from the diploid interspecific hybrid contains all the polypeptides characteristic of the two parents. One meiotic segregant had a hybrid RNA polymerase A with five of the polymorphic polypeptides (A49, A43, A19, A14.5, and A14) coming from S. douglasii and two (A40 and A34.5) from S. cerevisiae. In three successive backcrosses with S. cerevisiae, all the genes for S. douglasii polypeptides were shown to recombine although parental ditype tetrads predominated in the four four-spored asci examined. Thus, the genes for the seven polymorphic polypeptides are not clustered: they lie on at least three different chromosomes.