A New and Versatile Agrobacterium-Based Plant Transformation Vector

Abstract

The transformation of plant species for both experimental and biotechnological applications is most often achieved using Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated procedures (Ellis 1994). Binary Ti plasmids were developed primarily in the 1980s and have proved very useful in routine plant genetic manipulation work. However, the full potential for the versatility of binary Ti vectors has not been fully realised. The current designs available in the public domain are becoming increasingly obsolete as the demands and range of plant molecular biology increases. Current vectors tend to be in excess of 9kb in size, of low copy number in E.coli, and lack versatility in both cloning site and marker gene selection. In this proceedings paper we report the construction of a new vector Ti system, pGREEN, with allied selectable marker and reporter genes which addresses all of the above problems.