NIAB - National Institute of Agricultural Botany
Plant Science Into Practice
Transgenic Initiative
Crop Transformation Services
Contact: Andy Greenland
The Transgenic Initiative is a relatively new activity at NIAB, initially funded by the NIAB Trust, which has now evolved into a Crop Transformation Service. The key personnel have many years experience with various crop transformation systems and currently use two licensed methods to offer high throughput wheat transformation for both research and commercial applications. Efficiencies of up to 30% are now achieved with hexaploid spring wheat. Winter wheat and H.vulgare can also be transformed.
We are happy to collaborate with scientists within the plant science community, contributing to FEC costings and grant applications, or to provide a contract transformation service to commercial organisations within Europe. We can provide wheat transformation services ranging from 1 construct producing 20 independent transformed lines to large scale experiments.
We would be also be prepared to test the efficiency of other specific germplasm in transformation experiments, and are happy to develop new vectors in-house with third parties, or participate in the construct design process as necessary. Transformation of other crops may also be available. Please contact us to discuss your specific requirements and costs.
NIAB Research has interests in cereal disease resistance, novel traits and prebreeding targets. Our crop transformation capability allows us to validate candidate genes at an early stage, in a time and cost effective manner prior to their incorporation into TILLING, ecoTILLING or traditional breeding programmes, in addition to commercial opportunities for transgenic crops.