title: Advances and remaining challenges in the transformation of barley and wheat.
abstract: Highly efficient and cost-effective transformation technologies are essential for studying gene function in the major cereal crops, wheat and barley. Demand for efficient transformation systems to allow over-expression, or RNAi-mediated silencing of target genes, is greatly increasing. This is due to technology advances, such as rapid genome sequencing, enhancing the rate of gene discovery and thus leading to a large number of genes requiring functional analysis through transformation pipelines. Barley can be transformed at very high efficiency but the methods are genotype-dependent. Wheat is more difficult to transform, however, recent advances are also allowing the development of high-throughput transformation systems in wheat. For many gene function studies, barley can be used as a model for wheat due to its highly efficient transformation rates and smaller, less complex genome. An ideal transformation system needs to be extremely efficient, simple to perform, inexpensive, genotype-independent, and give the required expression of the transgene. Considerable progress has been made in enhancing transformation efficiencies, controlling transgene expression and in understanding and manipulating transgene insertion. However, a number of challenges still remain, one of the key ones being the development of genotype-independent transformation systems for wheat and barley.
authors.affiliation: Department of Crop Genetics, John Innes Centre, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, UK. wendy.harwood@jic.ac.uk
authors.forename: Wendy A
authors.initials: WA
authors.lastname: Harwood
mesh_terms: D018556:Crops, Agricultural / Q000235:genetics; D002523:Edible Grain / Q000235:genetics; D015870:Gene Expression / Q000235:genetics*; D017343:Genes, Plant / Q000235:genetics; D005822:Genetic Vectors; D005838:Genotype; D001467:Hordeum / Q000235:genetics*; D030821:Plants, Genetically Modified / Q000235:genetics*; D034622:RNA Interference; D014170:Transformation, Genetic / Q000235:genetics*; D019076:Transgenes / Q000235:genetics; D014908:Triticum / Q000235:genetics*