TRANSFORMING PLANT BIOLOGY: In 1986, three years after producing transgenic petunia and tobacco plants using Agrobacterium, a team from Monsanto developed a similar protocol to transform Arabidopsis. The researchers inserted a gene into the plant that would confer resistance to the antibiotic hygromycin. They then grew plants on medium that selects for hygromycin resistance. Wild-type plants (A) grew poorly, while most of the progeny of transgenic plants thrived (B-D).SCIENCE, 234:464-66, 1986. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM AAAS
In the fall of 1982, Robert Horsch, a tissue-culture expert hired by Monsanto a year earlier, came bursting out of the lab’s plant-growing room. Clutching a handful of experimental specimens, Horsch ran up and down the hallway yelling, “It worked! It worked! It worked!” Robb Fraley, Horsch’s colleague who is now Monsanto’s chief technology officer, recalls that special day. “I don’t think anyone was confused about what was happening. It was magical.”
From left to right: Monsanto collaborators Rogers, Roger Beachy, Horsch, and Fraley, at the first biotech crop test plot, 1987COURTESY OF MONSANTOWhat had worked was a transformation protocol that Fraley, Horsch, and their colleagues had developed to insert a foreign gene into petunia and tobacco plants using Agrobacterium tumefaciens (PNAS, 80:4803-07, 1983). Their success in developing what is still a go-to method for genetic engineering marked the beginning of a new era in agriculture and basic plant biology.
At the time, Monsanto was not known for any molecular-biology prowess, but rather for its agricultural chemical manufacturing. In 1981, the firm put together a small biotechnology dream team tasked with figuring out how to put genes into plants, with Fraley as the DNA-delivery expert, Horsch leading the way in tissue culture, and Steve Rogers pioneering recombinant DNA.
“What made it challenging and exciting and a scientific first was, if you think about it, we not only had to develop the method for getting a gene into a plant cell, but the ability to detect that gene and determine if ...
