Development of a methodology to produce genetically modified plants to be applied in basic genetics and plant breeding

Abstract

Transgenic plants are essential in genetics research and breeding when involve genes of agricultural interest. Tissue culture techniques and genetic engineering are relatively new and complex, being professionally executed in a few laboratories in Brazil, mainly in private companies. The rapid advancement of bioinformatics and others genetic engineering tools are increasing the number of possible genes to study, however one of the major problems is to produce transgenic plants. It is essential to obtain trustful results to test a good number of independent events. The answer (phenotype) resulting from the integration and expression of a single gene in a genome is usually very subtle. It is very important that the events are very homogeneous with high quality. The purpose of the project is to create a company to offer outsourcing service in tissue culture and genetic transformation of plants, mainly in sugarcane. The customer will give the gene of interest and the company will produce the required events and delivery in vitro plants ready for planting in greenhouse, and study incorporated genetic trait. This service already exists in US, but it is completely new in Brazil. The great challenge to achieve this goal is to develop a new methodology for transformation via Agrobacterium not described before in patents. In these first nine months the goal is: a) establish all tissue culture conditions to perform sugarcane transformation and obtain transgenic plants using the innovative methodology of transformation mediated-Agrobacterium and apply a patent, b) execute all procedures to get all authorizations in accordance with Brazilian OGM rules to start the business and sign some agreements of outsourcing service in sugarcane transformation. The impact will be very large for research of plant genetics in Brazil a) large reduction of time in sugarcane transformation: just four months to produce plants ready to be transferred to greenhouse, b) significant decrease of cost to obtain these plants, and specially c) great improvement in the final quality of research using transgenic events regarding the quality and homogeneity of plants, coming all from a single experiment of transformation. In Brazil, there are a great number of laboratories that perform plant genetic studies in public institutions and companies. We made a small questioner for 36 researchers and we got an amazing positive response: almost 2/3 of than are interested in hiring our sugarcane transformation outsourcing service and they agreed to have their names mentioned in the project. Besides, two private companies also are interesting to hire our job (just one gave authorization to have his name described in the project). (AU)