Production of Transgenic Crops by the Floral-Dip Method

The application of floral dipping toward the production of transformed plants has been rather limited. However, this procedure has enabled the successful production of transformed Medicago truncatula plants (a model plant for legume genetics) at efficiencies higher than those obtained by tissue culture methods. Indeed, this simple system, without requiring any knowledge of plant tissue culture, has been a breakthrough in the production of the first transgenic radish plants. This root crop is of major importance in the Far East, and the development of such a gene transfer system in radish has enabled agronomically important germplasms to be produced. Although the radish is closely related to Arabidopsis thaliana, it appears the two plants have different mechanisms of T-DNA transfer using floral dip. This chapter describes the simple system that has been adopted in the routine production of transgenic radish.