ABSTRACT
Students of plant molecular biology vary widely in their research goals for transferring foreign DNA into plant cells. In some cases, transient expression is sufficient to meet the experimental requirements; therefore, stable integration of the transferred DNA is not a necessity. Often, however, the function of a gene product within a differentiated plant is the objective. Furthermore, transferred DNA may be used as a genetic tag, insertional mutagen, or probe for plant regulatory signals. For these kinds of studies, stable integration of the foreign DNA must occur in a predictable and efficient manner, and the recovery of transgenic plants is needed. The particular research goal determines both the chosen mode of transfer as well as the genetic and molecular structure of the DNA that has been constructed for transfer.
