Plant of Solanaceae family used as a source of tobacco. Nicotiana tabacum

In order to learn the role of large numbers of genes (~20,000) a plant readily amenable to high-throughput transformation, plant propagation, and phenotypic screening was needed. Nicotiana tabacum, a member of the Solanaceae, was chosen for four reasons: 1) the species is readily transformed by Agrobacterium, 2) regeneration from transformed leaf discs produces uniform populations of explants, 3) the explants can be immediately transferred to soil and screened for phenotypic changes in the T0 generation, and 4) the species exhibits post-transcriptional gene silencing in stably transformed transgenic plants. A second aim of the project was to test whether information gained by high-throughput screening could be transferred to Arabidopsis from a dicot plant for which complete genome information is lacking.