Fertile transgenic Indica rice produced by expression of maize ubiquitin promoter-bar chimaeric gene in the protoplasts

Abstract

We report production of fertile transgenic Indica rice plants by transferring a chimaeric construct consisting of promoter, first exon and intron of maize ubiquitin gene (Ubi-1) and the coding sequences of the bar gene from Streptomyces hygroscopicus to the rice protoplasts through electroporation. In total, 11 plants were regenerated. All of them were fertile and set seeds on maturity. These plants were resistant to high concentration of PPT (400 mg l(-1)) which was otherwise toxic to the untransformed controls. The gene was inherited to the progenies of the five plants in Mendelian ratio.