The development of a biolistic transformation protocol for Cryptococcus neoformans over 25 years ago ushered in a new era of molecular characterization of virulence in this previously intractable fungal pathogen. However, due to the low rate of homologous recombination in this species, the process of creating targeted gene deletions using biolistic transformation remains inefficient. To overcom...

Agrobacterium tumefaciens mediated transformation may offer a better alternative than the biolistic gun for genetic transformation of maize plants. This gene delivery system results in a greater proportion of stable, low-copy number transgenic events than does the biolistic gun, and is highly efficient. In the present work, we studied maize transformation using A. tumefaciens by identifying som...

Contents 1. Introduction 2. Transformation of dicotyledonous plants 2.1 Transformation using Agrobacterium tumefaciens 2.1.1 The role of A. tumefaciens chromosomally encoded proteins and the Vir proteins 2.2 Other transformation methods 3. Transformation of monocotyledonous plants 3.1 Biolistic transformation 3.1.1 Gene silencing 3.2 Agrobacterium transformation 4. Transformation of algae 5. Pr...

Recently, the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha has received increasing attention as a basal plant model for multicellular studies. Its ease of handling, well-characterized plastome and proven protocols for biolistic plastid transformation qualify M. polymorpha as an attractive platform to study the evolution of chloroplasts during the transition from water to land. In addition, chloroplasts of M...

To obtain stable expression of a foreign gene, it is important to have optimized conditions for plant genetic transformation. Here, a GUS intron-containing gene driven by CaMV 35S promoter was used to optimize the conditions of biolistic transformation of banana immature embryos and also for the study of GUS localization in the transformed cells. The GUS activity detected histochemically and fl...

Parasitic helminths (worms belonging to several metazoan phyla) cause considerable morbidity and mortality in humans. They are an important veterinary problem, and they result in significant economic losses in animal grazing and agriculture. Experimental studies on parasitic helminths have been limited by a lack of parasite cell lines and methods for molecular genetic analyses. We evaluated par...