Department of Crop Genetics, John Innes Centre, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, UK.
J Exp Bot. 2012 Mar;63(5):1791-8. doi: 10.1093/jxb/err380. Epub 2011 Dec 3.
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.
高效且经济实用的转化技术对于研究小麦和大麦等主要谷物作物中的基因功能至关重要。人们对高效转化系统的需求日益增加，这些系统可用于过表达或 RNAi 介导的靶基因沉默。这是由于技术进步，如快速基因组测序，加速了基因的发现速度，从而导致需要通过转化途径对大量基因进行功能分析。大麦可以非常高效地转化，但方法依赖于基因型。小麦则更难转化，但最近的进展也使得在小麦中开发高通量转化系统成为可能。对于许多基因功能研究，由于大麦具有非常高的转化效率和较小、较简单的基因组，因此可以将其用作小麦的模型。理想的转化系统需要非常高效、简单易用、成本低廉、不依赖基因型，并能提供所需的转基因表达。在提高转化效率、控制转基因表达以及理解和操纵转基因插入方面已经取得了相当大的进展。然而，仍然存在一些挑战，其中一个关键挑战是开发针对小麦和大麦的不依赖基因型的转化系统。
