Single Somatic Embryogenesis from Transformant with Proteinase II Gene in Panax ginseng C.A. Meyer

Ginseng(Panax ginseng C.A. Meyer) is a perennial herbaceous plant which grows very slowly. It takes about 3 to 4 years from seeding to collecting the ripe seeds and the ginseng propagation is very difficult. and so, it is very difficult to breed ginseng plant. Ginseng tissue culture was started from at 1960, and ginseng commercial product by in vitro callus culture was saled, however upto now, regenerants were not planted to soil normally. Recently, plant genetic engineering to produce transgenic plants by introducing useful genes has been advanced greatly. In a present paper, transformation of ginseng plants was achieved by co-cultivation with Agrobacterium harboring the binary vector coding Proteinase-II gene, which confer resistant or tolerant to insect pests, The binary vector for transformation was constructed with disarmed Ti-plasmid and with double 35S promoter. The NPT II gene and introduced genes of the transgenic ginseng plants were successfully identified by the PCR. Especially the transgenic ginseng plants were regenerated using new techniques such as repetitive single somatic embryogenesis.