Leaf wounding and jasmonic acid act synergistically to enable efficient Agrobacterium-mediated transient transformation of Persea americana

Abstract Avocado, Persea americana Mill, is one of the most traded tropical fruits in the international market. Here, we report transient transformation of avocado leaves via agroinfiltration with the LBA4404 strain of Agrobacterium tumefaciens and constructs encoding the synthetic betalain gene biosynthesis cassette, RUBY, or GFP. The efficiency of transformation was dependent on leaf age, whilst microwounding and jasmonic acid treatments significantly enhanced transformation, acting synergistically to improve avocado transformation. This is the first report on Agrobacterium-mediated transient transformation on avocado leaves. It provides a useful tool in plant molecular and cellular biology research and has the potential to facilitate new capabilities to the genomics research community of this ancestral angiosperm.