Project Number: 1245-21000-141-02
Project Type: Specific Cooperative Agreement

Start Date: Jun 13, 2012
End Date: Apr 14, 2015

Objective:
The first objective is to develop robust transformation system and tissue culture protocols for quickening flowering in corn and tomato. The second objective is to construct gene(s) fused to tissue/organ-specific promoters and test their transformation frequency. The third objective is to generate transgenic plants homozygous with the introduced gene(s), and analyze them at cellular and molecular levels.

Approach:
The collaborator’s laboratory is adept in tissue culture technologies and transformation protocols. The collaborator will use gene constructs made in the ARS laboratory and develop transgenic corn and tomato plants. Because tissue-specific and other regulatable promoters, with and without fluorescent markers, will be employed for gene construction, their specificity of expression will be tested and validated at the whole plant level.