Interspecific Protoplast Fusion for the Transfer of Atrazine Resistance from Solanum Nigrum to Tomato (Lycopersicon Esculentum.L)

Abstract

Somatic cell fusion can be useful to transfer agriculturally important characters from one plant to another and to overcome sexual barriers between species, although fusions have so far worked mostly between closely related species. Atrazine resistance is due to modified functions of the Hill reaction in the chloroplasts, is maternally inherited and has been reported in many plant species (Gressel et al 1982). It has been transferred from the resistant Brassica campestris to B. napus through hybridization and backcrossing (Beversdorf et al 1980). Atrazine resistant plants have been regenerated from fused protoplasts of: haploid Solanum tuberosum L. and atrazine resistant S. nigrum (Binding et al 1982); cytoplasmic male sterile (cms) Raphanus sativus and atrazine resistant B. campestris (Pelletier et al 1983); and polima type cms B. napus and atrazine resistant B. napus (Barsby et al 1987).