Genetic Modification of Barley for End Use Quality

Summary

Since the late 70s both recombinant DNA technology and plant cell and tissue culture techniques have been applied to change the properties of crop plants. Ten years later, these technologies have been used more or less routinely to modify specific traits in a large number of dicotyledoneous plants, including important crop plants like tomato, potato, cotton and oil seed rape. The application of plant cell and tissue culture techniques as well as DNA-transfer technology to cereal crops has made considerable progress in the past decade. This has resulted in stable transformation methods for [hybrid] maize, rice and wheat in the early 90s.

In 1989 we initiated a research program aiming at the stable transformation of barley. To achieve this, the availability of efficient procedures to regenerate barley plants from cells and/or tissues is essential.

In this paper an overview is presented of our work on the development of an efficient and reproducible method of plant regeneration from barley microspores. The current protocol enables us to regenerate 50-100 green fertile barley plants from a single anther. The use of microspore cultures in studies on cell differentiation will be described. Finally, the use of transformation technologies to improve malting quality of barley will be discussed.

Address any correspondence to Dr. van Zijderveld.