Assessment of plant transformation technology of maize

Crop improvement is important criteria in the world. For this, conventional breeding is used to increase food production and create thousands of crop varieties to fulfil the demands of agricultural products. But conventional breeding is failure due to time consuming, unpredictability and lack of relative varieties. So, to overcome such problem, genetic engineering was introduced. It allows gene transfer without conventional breeding, for unrelated genera or species. It helps in increasing genetic resource to improve crop and also introduce known function of genes to achieve the goals of crop improvement by genetic engineering programme which is more predictable. There are no robust transformation technologies available in maize for higher transformation efficiency and quality of products. For this, two methods are developed. They are tissue culture dependent and independent for gene transfer technology. The methods are Agrobacterium mediated transformation and particle bombardment. To these methods, results are evaluated and assessed for both Agrobacterium and biolistic gene gun/particle bombardment with parameters like transformation efficiency, copy number, expression level of GUS gene and its inheritance. The transformation efficiency and copy number is higher in the biolistic gene gun/particle bombardment when compared to Agrobacterium mediated transformation but expression levels are low, may be attributed due to gene silencing and suppressing. Whereas in Agrobacterium mediated method, transformation efficiency and copy number is low, but expression levels are higher when compared to particle bombardment. The present report indicates that the Agrobacterium derived transformants has low copy number, higher expression of the transgene and its stability of gene is more than the biolistic gene gun/particle bombardment.