ABSTRACT

The use of traditional breeding for improvement of avocado cultivars is time consuming, hence other methods such as genetic transformation by Agrobacterium is indispensable to adopt. The strain GV3850/pBI121gave best transformation outcome compared to five other binary vectors (AGL1/pCGP904; AGL1/pBI121; GV3850/pCGP904; LBA4404/pCG-P904 and LBA4404/pBI121) under different pH and acetosyringone concentrations. The optimal condition for reliable transformation was by using 200 µM acetosyringone and a pH of 5.2. Transformed embryonic shoots co-cultivated with GV3850/pBI121 were tested using the histochemical x-gluc assay. Further analysis was conducted by polymerase chain reaction using specific primers for the reporter gene (GUS)