Question

Importance of agrobacterium in plant biotechnology

Answer 1

The transformation method that is being more widely used in many plant species makes use of Agrobacterium tumefaciens, a soil bacteria that works as a natural genetic engineer. Agrobacterium tumefaciens can invade plants through wounds in the stem or root.

Answer 2

Agrobacterium tumefaciens is nature's genetic engineer. It is a gram-negative rod-shaped bacteria. It consists of both linear and circular chromosome. Its genome has  5.7 million base-pairs and has the inherent ability to integrate into the DNA of plant hosts.

It has become the most used method for the introduction of foreign genes into plant cells and the subsequent regeneration of transgenic plants. It is the most popular vector till date. The genetic material that is introduced is called T-DNA (transferred DNA) which is located on a Ti plasmid. A Ti plasmid is a circular piece of DNA found in almost all bacteria.

The advantages of using Agrobacterium-mediated transformation over other transformation methods are:

1. reduction in transgene copy number

2. intact and stable integration of the transgene (newly introduced gene) into the plant genome