FIURE 1: STELA protocol and investigation of UT4/5-containing telomeres. (A) Schematic illustration of the structure of UT4 and UT5-containing telomeres in U. maydis. The use of telorette oligos to modify the C-strand and the use of primers (UT4/5-F and teltail) to generate STELA products are also illustrated. (B) Four individual STELA PCR reactions for UT4/5 telomeres were performed using 2.5 pg of ligated wild type DNA as the template and shown on the left. A parallel Southern analysis is shown on the right. The same UT4/5 subtelomeric probe was used to detect telomere fragments in both anal-yses. (C) STELA assays were performed using 5 pg wild type DNA as the template, and the UT4/5-F and teltail oligos as primers. Following gel electrophoresis and transfer to a nylon membrane, the products were first detected using a UT4/5 subtelomeric probe (left panel). Subsequently, the UT4/5 probe was stripped from the membrane and the products re-analyzed using a TTAGGG repeat probe (middle panel). The sizes of the STELA fragments in the middle panel were determined using TESLA software. The lengths of the telomere tracts were then calculated by subtracting the subtelomere length (~630 bp), and then plotted (right). Error bars designate standard error of means.