Transgenic Maize

Maize is one of the world’s highest value crops, with a multibillion dollar annual contribution to agriculture. The great adaptability and high yield of maize as a food, feed and forage crop have led to its production on a massive scale, with acreage expanding at the expense of other crops.

This book covers the recent advances carried on improvement of transformation methods together with assessment of the impact of genetically transformed crops on biosafety. Each chapter has been written by one or more experienced researchers in the field and then carefully edited to ensure throughness and consistency.

This volume discusses techniques used for the molecular characterization of maize. This book is divided into 4 parts: cell, tissue, and organ culture and maize transformation; gene silencing and generation of mutant populations; plant gene expression; and plant metabolic networks. The chapters cover a range of topics, such as growing and propagating maize in the laboratory, greenhouse and field studies, screening mutagenic population, characterizing the genome, describing protein and metabolic regulatory networks, and generating transgenic plants for gene knock-out and over expression purposes.

Transgenic plants serve as essential tools for research in plant biology and are the basis of modern agricultural biotechnology. In Transgenic Plants: Methods and Protocols, leading scientists describe readily reproducible techniques they have perfected for the genetic transformation and regeneration of plants. The authors cover the most commonly used transformation systems, including Agrobacterium tumefaciens, Agrobacterium rhizogenes, particle bombardment, electroporation, floral-dip, and chloroplast transformation, as well as the regeneration of whole transgenic plants by organogenesis and somatic embryogenesis from different explant cells/tissues and from such diverse plant species as tomato, cassava, conifers, and citrus.