Comparison of three wheat near isogenic lines originated from CB037 on tissue culture and transformation capacities

Abstract

Wheat is an important worldwide food crop. To meet the increasing demand for wheat grains, it is essential to continuously improve wheat by commercial and advanced technologies. Wheat line CB037 has ideal agronomic traits, good bread quality, strong resistance to powdery mildew (PM), and high regeneration ability, and therefore it has been widely used in hybridization breeding and genetic transformation. Three near isogenic lines (NILs) from CB037 were identified in a previous study based on glutenin composition. In this study, the three NILs of CB037A, CB037B, and CB037C were investigated comparatively for agronomic traits, disease resistance for PM and stripe rust, and tissue culture and transformation abilities. Results indicated that the three NILs were high resistant to PM, and CB037B was not only high resistant to stripe rust but also had significantly higher regeneration ability than CB037A and CB037C in anther culture, immature and mature embryo culture. Particularly, positive transgenic wheat plants were obtained only from CB037B. Thereby CB037B was identified to be a desirable material for wheat genetic transformation, which was of great significance for improving the transformation efficiency and accelerating the application of genetic engineering breeding technology in wheat.