Transformation of cereals via Agrobacterium and the pollen pathway: a critical assessment |
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Authors: | Peter Langridge Reinhold Brettschneider Paul Lazzeri † Horst Lörz |
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Institution: | Center for Cereal Biotechnology, Waite Agricultural Research Institute, Glen Osmond, S.A. 5064, Australia;Zentrum für Angewandte Molekularbiologie der Pflanzen, AMP II, Institut für Allgemeine Botanik, Ohnhorststr. 18, D-2000 Hamburg 52, Germany |
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Abstract: | It has been proposed that transgenic plants of cereals can be generated by inoculating florets with Agrobacterium at or near anthesis. This procedure is shown to lead to the production of embryos of wheat and barley with enhanced resistance to antibiotic selection. It has also been possible to recover plants of wheat, barley and maize that gave positive hybridization signals with probes produced from within the T-DNA of the Agrobacterium vector. However, no evidence was found for transmission of the bands detected by hybridization in the progeny of the putative transgenic plants nor could enzyme activity associated with the resistance genes be found in plant extracts. Furthermore, undigested genomic DNA from the plants that were positive when probed with the T-DNA, showed hybridization to bands smaller than the genomic DNA. It is suggested that the apparent transformation is an artifact of the procedure and does not reflect transformation of the plant nuclear genome. |
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