An attempt to establish an Agrobacterium-mediated transient expression system in medicinal plants

Genetic transformation has always been an important method for studying medical plant secondary metabolic regulation, among which stable transformation has a good reproducibility. However, it was time-consuming to obtain a stable transformed hairy root or transgenic plants, which was difficult to satisfy the great demand of researches on medical plant secondary metabolism-related genes. Moreover, Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transient transformation has been extensively applied in studies of functional genes because of its simpleness, low cost, and short period. However, presently, researches on medical plant functional genes commonly used stable genetic transformation and some high-cost and high-difficulty transient transformation methods, such as gene gun and protoplast transformation. Thus, in this study, we selected the seedlings of Nicotiana benthamiana, Salvia miltiorrhiza, and Prunella vulgaris as the experimental material, with the methods of Agrobacterium tumefaciens injection, fast Agrobacterium-mediated seedling transformation (FAST), and FAST and mechanical damage. The results demonstrated that the injection transient transformation system of pCAMBIA1301 vector mediated by A. tumefaciens and the transient transformation of seedling system were not established in S. miltiorrhiza. In addition, the instantaneous transformation system of N. benthamiana and P. vulgaris seedlings was basically set up by FAST method. Besides, using the method of FAST and mechanical damage, the transient genetic transformation system of P. vulgaris seedlings was established for the first time. A. tumefaciens-mediated transient transformation of seedlings with pEAQ vectors provided an effective way and reference for the further study of functional genes of the medicinal plants N. benthamiana and P. vulgaris.