Author(s)

Muhammad F. Ahmed, Arumugam S. Kantharajah, Paul Holford

Department of Agricultural Sciences, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon.
University of Western Sydney, South Penrith DC, Australia.

The use of traditional breeding for improvement of avocado cultivars is time consuming, hence other methods such as genetic transformation by Agrobacterium is indispensable to adopt. The strain GV3850/pBI121gave best transformation outcome compared to five other binary vectors (AGL1/pCGP904; AGL1/pBI121; GV3850/pCGP904; LBA4404/pCG-P904 and LBA4404/pBI121) under different pH and acetosyringone concentrations. The optimal condition for reliable transformation was by using 200 μM acetosyringone and a pH of 5.2. Transformed embryonic shoots co-cultivated with GV3850/pBI121 were tested using the histochemical x-gluc assay. Further analysis was conducted by polymerase chain reaction using specific primers for the reporter gene (GUS).

Avocado; Persea; Binary Vectors; GUS Reporter

M. Ahmed, A. Kantharajah and P. Holford, "Genetic Transformation Studies on Avocado Cultivar “Hass” (Persea americana)," American Journal of Plant Sciences, Vol. 3 No. 9, 2012, pp. 1225-1231. doi: 10.4236/ajps.2012.39148.