Grant: Engage Grants Program

Solanum Genomics International Inc (Fredericton, NB, Canada) is a privately held bioscience company whosemission is to develop and adapt methods to improve potatoes for commercial markets. Due to all the patentsissued and licensing fees required to use Agrobacterium-mediated plant transformation, the company relies onthe use of a publicly available non-Agrobacterium mediated transformation system to insert variousgenes/alleles of interest into potato plants. This system, named TransBacter (Cambia, Canberra, Australia),involves the use of the vector pCAMBIA1105.1r, in which genes of interest are inserted and then transferredinto potato plants using the bacterium Sinorhizobium meliloti, which acts as a messenger by delivering thevector into potato cells. Unfortunately, the efficiency of this approach has so far been very low (transformationefficiencies below 1%) and limiting for transforming the potato plant. Also, one of the selection marker geneused in this system, hyg, which encodes resistance to the antibiotic hygromycin, is expensive, difficult to obtainand fairly toxic. For all these reasons, the company has requested my help to modify/optimize theirtransformation system. Similar work has been previosuly conducted in my laboratory and we have the expertiseto perform this project. Therefore, in this project, we propose three objectives:Objective 1: Validate the feasibility of using a novel Ensifer adhaerens OV14/pCAMBIA5105 system fortransforming the potato cultivars Bintje and Shepody.Objective 2: Test and optimize the transformation parameters for achieving high and constant potatotransformation efficiencies.Objective 3: Replace the hyg marker gene in pCAMBIA5105 by another selectable marker gene.Optimizing this novel transformation system will allow fast-tracking the development and commercializationof novel superior potato cultivars. This will provide a commercial competitive advantage to the companySolanum Genomics by improving its efficiency and reducing costs.