News: Nigerian Scientist Develops Improved Systems To Enhance Plant Transformation Efficiency.

Published 12:00 AM EST, Fri Sep 12, 2025 In a recent article published in Frontiers in Plant Science, Dr. Aliu reported a dual strategy to overcome some bottlenecks in Agrobacterium-mediated transformation. Despite its status as a gold-standard technique, Agrobacterium-mediated transformation is often hampered by bacterial overgrowth and instability in genetic constructs.

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Plant molecular biologist Dr. Ephraim Aliu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ South China Botanical Garden has developed innovative tools to improve Agrobacterium-mediated plant transformation, a cornerstone of crop genetic engineering. Building on his Ph.D. work at Iowa State University, Aliu designed strategies to overcome persistent challenges such as bacterial overgrowth and instability in genetic constructs. His dual system combines engineered thymidine auxotrophic and recA-deficient Agrobacterium strains with a new ternary helper plasmid (pKL2299A) that enhances DNA transfer into plant cells.

The auxotrophic strains, based on widely used transformation strains like EHA101 and LBA4404, require external thymidine for survival, allowing scientists to eliminate them from plant cultures without antibiotics. This makes transformation both safer and more environmentally friendly. Meanwhile, the helper plasmid supplies additional virulence genes, boosting transformation efficiency. In maize trials, this system improved success rates from 25.6% to 33.3%—a significant gain for a process typically measured in small increments.

Aliu’s contributions extend beyond this breakthrough. His earlier work introduced a CRISPR RNA-guided integrase system for targeted DNA insertion in supervirulent Agrobacterium strains, and he pioneered methods to reconfigure bacterial genomes using the INTEGRATE system. His research has been recognized with multiple awards and is now being disseminated to both academic labs and commercial vendors, accelerating efforts to develop improved and more sustainable crops.

For the cannabis industry, these innovations are highly relevant. Cannabis genetic transformation has historically faced low efficiency and technical bottlenecks, limiting advances in precision breeding, disease resistance, and secondary metabolite optimization (like cannabinoids and terpenes). Safer, more efficient Agrobacterium systems could enable researchers to reliably introduce beneficial traits—such as pest resistance, optimized flowering, or cannabinoid pathway enhancements—without excessive culture losses. By lowering barriers to transformation, Dr. Aliu’s methods could fast-track cannabis biotechnology, bridging traditional breeding with modern genome editing tools. Source: This Day