A Review: Agrobacterium-mediated Gene Transformation to Increase Plant Productivity

Abstract

In genetics and molecular biology, Gene transformation is a gene alteration technique that involves the introduction and expression of a foreign gene into the host organism. There are many gene transformation methods like particle bombardment, electroporation, micro-injection, PEG for different biotechnological experiments. But Plant gene transformation is a widely used procedure for obtaining transgenic plants and plant models to understand gene functions. Agrobacterium tumefaciens is a natural genetic engineer which is rod-shaped, gram-negative soil-born bacteria. Initially, Agrobacterium was utilized to transform only dicot plants but over the year’s modification in plant transformation protocol it was now utilized in monocot plants as well as in fruits plants too. Agrobacterium tumefaciens inserts its DNA (Transfer DNA-T-DNA) into the host plant. The transmitted DNA is randomly integrated into the host cell's genetic material inside the infected plant cell nucleus. Alternatively, bacterial DNA can transiently remain in the nucleus without integrating into the genome, but it still replicates alongside the plant genome, using its machinery and expressing its genes to make separate gene products. Besides the traditional method, new research has also been done to transform the plants through agrobacterium. Various methods have been developed to transform monocotyledonous plants such as wheat, maize, rice, and fruity plants. Generally, dicotyledonous plants can be transformed by the traditional method of agrobacterium but various methods have also been developed for dicots for various applications. Here, we have taken an example of a tobacco plant (nicotiana tabacum) transformed with different methods.