Development of a Tissue Culture Transformation Process for Prairie Cordgrass.

Prairie cordgrass (Spartina pectinata) a native grass to North America shows great promise as a feedstock for the production of bioenergy.  One of the reasons that prairie cordgrass is being considered as a feedstock is its ability to grow on marginal land, such as soils low in fertility, or high in salinity.  One problem common with cellulosic ethanol production is the lignin that is present in the cell walls of the plant.  The lignin binds together the cellulose chains, and thus lowers the efficiency of degradation, for the cellulose is unable to be broken down to simple sugar units.   It is possible with the proper techniques to turn off the lignin gene, or limit its role in cellular metabolism. With tissue culture, it is possible to change this gene, unfortunately, there is no protocol published on these procedures.  The protocol that was worked on uses Agrobacterium mediated transformation with the use of prairie cordgrass callus.  Seedlings were germinated on MS media, then after germination, they were placed onto callus production media.  After the seedlings have produced the callus, they are put through a transformation process, and allowed to grow on a media that has antibiotics, which was used to eliminate the callus that did not succeeded in being transformed.