Transformation of Rape with Agrobacterium tumeficiens-Based Vectors

Agrobacterium tumefaciens, a soil bacterium that causes crown gall disease on a wide range of dicotyledonous plants, has been used most widely as a vehicle for gene transfer into plants (1,2). The transferred genes are stably integrated into the genomes of the transgenic plants and are transmitted to progeny as dominant mendelian traits (3,4). Since the production of auxins and cytokinins coded by oncogenes on T-DNA is often incompatible with normal plant development, it is often desirable to "disarm" the plasmids by removing the oncogenes and, therefore, allow the transformed plant cells to differentiate in a normal manner, rather than grow in a tumorous fashion.