Sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L.).

Creating transgenic plants is invaluable for the genetic analysis of sugar beet and will be increasingly important as sugar beet genomic technologies progress. A protocol for Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of sugar beet is described in this chapter. Our protocol is optimized for a sugar beet genotype that performs exceptionally well in tissue culture, including the steps of dedifferentiation, callus proliferation, and regeneration. Because of the infrequent occurrence of such a genotype in sugar beet populations, our protocol includes an in vitro propagation method for germplasm preservation. The starting materials for transgenic experiments are aseptic shoots grown from surface-sterilized seed balls. Callus is induced from leaf explants and subsequently infected with Agrobacterium. Plantlets are regenerated from transgenic callus and vernalized for flowering, if necessary. The efficiency of transformation was quite high; in our laboratory, the culture of only ten leaf explants, on average, generated one transgenic plant.