Use of competitive PCR to assay copy number of repetitive elements in banana.

Banana is one of the most important subtropical fruit crops. Genetic improvement by traditional breeding strategies is difficult and better knowledge of genomic structure is needed. Repeated sequences are powerful markers for genetic fingerprinting. The method proposed here to determine the copy number of nuclear repetitive elements is based on competitive reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction and can also be used for quantifying cytosolic sequences. The reliability of this method was investigated on crude preparations of total DNA. Variations due to the heterogeneity of crude DNA extracts showed that a single locus reference is needed for accurate quantification. A mapped microsatellite locus was used to normalize copy number measurements. Copy number assay of repetitive elements using this method clearly distinguishes between the two banana subspecies investigated: Musa acuminata spp. banskii and M. acuminata spp. malaccensis. Two repetitive sequence families, pMaCIR1115 and pA9-26, were assayed that cover up to 1% of the M. acuminata genome. Their copy number varied up to six fold between the two subspecies. Furthermore, sequence quantification showed that mitochondrial genomes are present in crude leaf-extracted banana DNA at up to 40 copies per cell.