Flax Transformation via Floral-Dipping

Abstract

Plant transformation is a process by which a foreign DNA (called a transgene) is inserted into the genome of a plant; the resulting plant is said to be a transgenic plant. Flax transformation is possible with techniques such as biolistic particles, ultrasound sonication or Agrobacterium infection by wounding and co-cultivation, followed by regeneration. These techniques not only yield low transformed plants but are also long and prone to being accompanied by many mutational events. Agrobacterium-mediated plant transformation via floral-dip is a widely used technique in the field of plant transformation and has been reported to be successful for many plant species. However, flax transformation by floral-dip has only recently been reported. In this chapter we demonstrate that Agrobacterium and the floral-dip method is an applicable technique to transformed flax. We show that this technique is simple, inexpensive, efficient, and, more importantly, gives a high transformation rate.