Cotton Biotechnology: An Efficient Gene Transfer Protocol via Agrobacterium tumefaciens for a Greater Transgenic Recovery

Due to its economic worth, cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) is grown in almost 70 countries and provides income for more than 250 million people. Therefore, producing cotton with having some desired characteristics that includes extended biotic and abiotic stress tolerance, improved fiber quality, promoted nutritional content and increased yield is the main objective for cotton biotechnology. To achieve this goal, many tissue culture and gene transfer techniques are being developed and used throughout the years. As applications for the gene transfer, the Agrobacterium-mediated, particle bombardment and pollen tube pathway-mediated methods are most successfully used and in conjunction with this, meristematic shoot tips as explants are efficiently utilized in gene transfer methods. In this study, the main objective was to report an efficient protocol for a greater recovery of transgenic cotton plant using Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transformation. For this, one of the cotton strains (Cukurova 1518) cultivated widely in Turkey was chosen and meristematic shoot tips as explant sources, and GFP and NPTII genes as reporter and marker genes were used, respectively. The effective post co-cultivation conditions were provided via using the selection regime in vitro. Finally, the current results showed highly reproducible protocol developed could be used to produce transgenic cotton plants expressing desired traits or can be utilized as a model system to study the expression of particular genes.