Prospects for Eucalyptus Transformation, 1997 Biological Sciences Symposium Proceedings

EucaIyptus continues to increase in importance as a plantation species for the production of pulpwood, sawn timber, veneer, mining timber, poles, charcoal, fire wood and essential oils. Research is productivity plantations. Considerable increasingly being and environmental attention is being focused on improving aspects of Eucalyptus focused on integrating biotechnology into conventional tree breeding to enhance Eucalyptus improvement strategies and produce “new” and “novel” products. What genetic engineering (gene transfer and recombinant DNA technology) potentially offers to the Eucabptus breeder are opportunities to add new genes into selected elite clones with little disturbance of the tree’s genome. This process does not involve sexual reproduction thus the desirable trait is kept intact as is the Eucabptus genomic background. “New” genes may also include genes that do not occur naturally in the Eucabptus genome, allowing advantage to be taken of previously inaccessible genes by overcoming taxonomic barriers. This paper will briefly review the status of Eucalyptus transformation, traits being investigated which would add value to Eucalyptus, methodology being developed @tgrobacterium-mediated aud direct gene transfer methods), limitations, aud future prospects. Research has focused on developing reliable transformation aud regeneration protocols for Eucalyptus to facilitate the genetic manipulation of traits of commercial interest such as herbicide insect and disease tolerance, male sterility, rooting ability, cold, drought aud salinity tolerance, and wood properties as genes for these traits become available. Good progress has been made, but factors such as availability -of genes, method of gene transfer, physiological age of the plant material and regeneration of transformed plants, still limits the commercial use of gene transfer in Eucalyptus…