Close linkage of eye color genes in Tribolium castaneum.

N the course of linkage studies involving several new mutations affecting eye I pigmentation in the flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, it became apparent that while being nonallelic to each other and to previously reported eye mutants they were not randomly distributed in the genome. In fact, of the nine eye mutant loci thus far reported, six occur as colsely linked members of three gene pairs. It is the purpose of this report to present these new linkage relationships in T. castaneum and to discuss the nonrandom distribution of these genes in terms of their apparent locational-functional relationships.