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Wheat Information Service
Number 84: 25-32 (1997)
Research article

The rice Actl promoter gave high activity of transient gusA expression in callus, immature embryos and pollen embryoids of common wheat and its relatives following particle bombardment

S. Takumi, M. Otani and T. Shimada

Research Institute of Agricultural Resources, Ishikawa Agricultural College, Nonoichi-machi,Ishikawa 921, Japan


Summary

A wheat transformation system was developed by using particle bombardment and scutellar tissues of immature embryos as its target. The promoter region preceding a marker gene is one of the most important factors affecting transformation frequency. In this study, the 5' upstream sequence of the rice actin 1 gene (Actl) showed high activity of transient expression in various wheat cell types including embryogenic call), immature embryos and pollen embryoids of several wheat accessions. All three callus lines, including two aneuploid lines, showed high activity of transient expression of gusA gene. In pollen embryoids, the activity of transient gusA expression was similar among four wheat cultivars, but the activity after two days of incubation was slightly higher than that after five days of incubation in three of cultivars. The scutellar tissues of both tetraploid and hexaploid wheats provided an efficient level of the gusA expression. The present findings suggest that the rice Actl promoter is a useful promoter in the transformation system of common wheat and its relatives.

Key words: gusA, cultured cells, microprojectile bombardment, promoter activity, wheat


Introduction

In common wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), particle bombardment developed by Sanford et al. (1987) is a useful method for gene delivery to intact cells (Wang et al. 1988). This system has been widely used as the method for obtaining transgenic wheat plants. Tranagenic wheat plants have been produced from embryogenic suspension cells (Vasil et al. 1992) and scutellar tissues of immature embryos (Weeks et al. 1993; Vasil et al. 1993; Nehra et al. 1994; Becker et al. 1994), but not from other tissues including pollen embryoids. The pollen embryoid is an attractive target for particle bombardment because doubled haploid plants can be regenerated from microspore derived embryos by anther culture (Henry and De Buyser 1990). The scutellar tissues of immature embryos are commonly used targets for production of tranagenic plants because multiple plants can be easily regenerated from the calli induced from scutellar tissues through immature embryo culture (Scott et al. 1990).


Corresponding author: Shigeo Takurni

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