Advances in Agrobacterium-Mediated Sugarcane Transformation and Stable Transgene Expression

The sugarcane plant, with complex genetic characteristics and a lengthy breeding process, is challenging for genetic improvement through traditional breeding. Genetic engineering offers an opportunity for trait-specific sugarcane variety improvement. Transformation and transgene expression are key technologies to enable the application of biotechnology to sugarcane improvement, and technical challenges have been reported in both of these areas. An efficient Agrobacterium-mediated transformation system for multiple diverse sugarcane varieties has been developed to an industrial scale. The transgenic events generated have demonstrated high level transgene expression over multiple seasons in the field. Syngenta is now applying this technology on a larger scale in sugarcane improvement research.