Stable Transformation of Plants

This chapter provides an overview of the main steps in the process to produce stably transformed plants. Most transformation methods use tissue culture to recover adult plants from regenerable explants and can be divided into three stages: (1) choice and preparation of explant tissue, (2) deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) delivery, (3) callus induction/regeneration and selection. Each of these stages is introduced from a general perspective and a detailed protocol for our exemplar species, wheat, is given. We focus here on DNA delivery by particle bombardment as Agrobacterium -mediated transformation methods for wheat are reported elsewhere (29 ).