In Planta Agrobacterium-Mediated Transformation of Adult Arabidopsis thaliana Plants by Vacuum Infiltration

Abstract

In this chapter, we describe a new protocol for obtaining transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana plants by a so-called in planta transformation method. Such methods, with no in vitro culture or regeneration step, have already been described. Briefly, germinating seeds (Feldmann and Marks 1987) or wounded plants (Chang et al. 1994) are inoculated with an appropriate Agrobacterium strain; plants are then grown to maturity and their seeds collected. Transformants are selected at low frequency among the progeny of inoculated plants. The main advantages of these methods are the simplicity of the procedure and the low frequency of somaclonal variants in the transgenic lines, which is particularly useful for T-DNA mutagenesis strategies (Feldmann 1991).