The pea (Pisum sativum) is an important grain legume crop plant that has gained worldwide economic importance as a source of protein for animal and human nutrition. In addition, it has well-defined genetics, and it has been commonly used as a model plant for research in plant physiology and biochemistry. The productivity and value of peas could be greatly increased by the introduction of stably inherited traits such as pest and disease resistance, herbicide resistance, and improved protein quality. These traits are not available in natural populations of near relatives of cultivated peas, but current advances in plant genetic engineering provide a potentially powerful tool for achieving these goals by another means.The prerequisites for the transfer of foreign genes into any plant species by genetic engineering are an efficient gene delivery system, such as Agrobacterium-mediated DNA transfer, an effective selectable marker for transformed cells, and the ability to regenerate mature, fertile, transgenic plants from transformed tissue in culture.Regeneration via embryogenesis or organogenesis has been described for a variety of pea explants, e.g. from immature leaflets (Mroginski and Kartha, 1981;Rubluo et al., 1984), from cotyledonary node (Jackson and Hobbs, 1990), from hypocotyls (Nielsen et al., 1991), from embryos (Kysely et * Corresponding author; fax 61-6-246-5000. 75 1 Natali and Cavallini, 1987;Tetu et al., 1990), from various organs of seedlings (Malmberg, 1979;Hussey and Gunn, 1984;Ezhova et al., 1985), and from protoplast cultures (Jacobsen and Kysely, 1984; Puonti-Kaerlas and Eriksson, 1988; Lehminger-Mertens and Jacobsen, 1989). Agrobacterium-mediated transfonnation of various pea explants has also been reported, e.g. stem explants (Lulsdorf et al., 199 l), embryonic axis and epicotyl segments (Filippone and Lurquin, 1989;Puonti-Kaerlas et al., 1989), nodus explants (De Kathen and Jacobsen, 1990; Nauerby et al., 1991), and root explants and protoplasts (Schaerer and Pilet, 1991). Tumors were induced in young pea plants by wild-type Agrobacterium . However, no mature transgenic pea plants were regenerated from any of the above transformation systems. The only report to date of stable transformation of peas and the production of mature, flowering, transgenic pea plants is by Puonti-Kaerlas et al. (1990), who achieved regeneration by organogenesis via callus formation using a gene encoding hygromycin phosphotransferase as a selectable marker.In this paper we report the development of a routine, reliable transformation and regeneration system for peas. The procedure has been used to introduce herbicide resistance and the expression of an antibiotic resistance gene into two cultivars of peas using an Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated delivery system. Integration of the two traits was stable, and their frequency in the first generation progeny followed the Mendelian pattem.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Plant Material and Transformation ProcedurePea (Pisum sativum L.) cv Greenfeast and cv Rondo were grown in t...