was isolated from argabidopsis thaliana dna using the polymerase chain reaction with taq and taq extender using the following two primers according to published procedures thomas c 1996 primer 1 seq id no 1 atcgaagctt ctaaatgtac tgaaaagaaa ca primer 2 seq id no 2 actgggatcc gaaaatggaa ggtaaggttg tgc primers were based on the sequence given in the genbank dna sequence entry atagamsg for the genomic agamous sequence primer 1 contains an added hindiii restriction site at its 5 39 end primer 2 contains an added bamhi restriction site at its 5 39 end the following primers were designed from the genbank sequence entry athapetala in order to amplify out part of the apetala3 gene sequence primer 3 seq id no 3 atcgggatcc atgggctcac ggttttgtgt ga primer 4 seq id no 4 atcggagctc ttattcaaga agatggaagg taatga primer 3 was specifically designed to begin amplification at position 992 of the published apetala3 sequence which is a start codon in the wrong reading frame to produce an active product and which avoids the initial part of the sequence that has strong homologies with other mads box genes in the same gene family primer 3 also contained a one base pair change from the published sequence to remove an unwanted saci restriction site primer 3 has a bamhi restriction site at its 5 39 end primer 4 has a saci site at its 5 39 end a 1586 bp fragment was amplified from arabidopsis dna using primers 3 amp 4 using pcr the following cloning methods are familiar to any one skilled in the art and the results can be obtained by following the methods in sambrook et al 1989 the agamous promoter fragment was ligated into a pbluescript derived vector stratagene ltd cambridge uk as.