Establishment of a high efficiency Agrobacterium-mediated transformation system of rice (Oryza sativa L.)

Technologies for transformation of rice have been developed to meet the requirements of functional genomics in order to enable the production of transgenic rice plants with useful agricultural characters. However, many rice varieties are not efficiently transformed by Agrobacterium. We have succeeded in establishing a highly efficient transformation system in rice by co-cultivating rice calli with Agrobacterium on three filter papers moistened with enriched N6 or DKN media instead of using solid media. Rice calli immersed in Agrobacterium suspension (EHA101, Agrobacterium concentration of OD600 = 0.04) were co-cultured on three pieces of filter paper (9 cm in diameter) moistened with 5.5 mL of N6 or DKN liquid co-cultivation medium supplemented with 2,4-d (2 mg/L), proline (10 mM), casein hydrolysate (300 mg/L), sucrose (30 g/L), glucose (5 g/L), l-cysteine (100 mg/L) and acetosyringone (15 mg/L) at 25 °C for 3 days in the dark. Compared with the transformation efficiency of calli co-cultivated on solid media, transformation efficiency was increased by about fivefold by using the filter paper method for many varieties of rice, including those that previously yielded much poor transformation rates.