Search

Arabidopsis thaliana (L.) Heynh. has emerged as the dominant plant species used in molecular genetics and functional genomics. Although it possesses several attributes of model organisms, the ease with which it can be transformed genetically is a paramount factor that has led to its widespread application as a tool for functional genomics. Progress made in the late 1990s has relieved users of the need to use a vacuum chamber for transformation, substituting its function with a surfactant known as Silwet L-77, to facilitate access to ovules by bacterial solution. Here, we evaluate the substitution of Silwet L-77 by XIAMETER OFX-0309. We demonstrate that transformation efficiency can be increased by an average of 3-fold (and up to 10-fold) solely by replacing Silwet L-77 with XIAMETER OFX-0309. Because downstream selection of transgenic plants, in either soil or Petri dishes, can be long and tedious, this substitution represents a significant reduction of time and materials required to retrieve transgenic lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]