A high‐throughput transient expression system for rice (Plant Cell Environ)

Transient expression platforms allow short-term expression of candidate genes in the host plant, without the integration of DNA into the host genome. The expression cassettes are delivered to the host cells either by Agrobacterium- or microprojectile-mediated approaches. Agrobacterium-mediated transformation is laborious as it needs mature plants, significant time-gap between transformation and observation of results, and also, it induces widespread gene expression changes that influences the dynamics of transgene expression. Microprojectile-based bombardment approach is expensive and requires specialized equipment to achieve transient expression in host cells. Given this, Page et al. have developed a highly-efficient polyethylene glycol (PEG)-mediated protoplast transformation protocol for transient expression in rice. The optimized protocol reported a transformation efficiency of 30%. The procedure is “cheap” as it requires no expensive chemicals, equipment or reagents, “fast”, with imaging possible 16 hours post-transformation, and “robust”, as it could be coupled to any high‐throughput cloning platform (Summary by Muthamilarasan Mehanathan) Plant Cell Environ 10.1111/pce.13542