ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER Production of herbicide-resistant sweet potato plants transformed with the bar gene Gibum Yi Æ Young-Mi Shin Æ Goh Choe Æ Byoungchul Shin Æ Young Soon Kim Æ Kyung-Moon Kim Received: 11 October 2006 / Revised: 1 December 2006 / Accepted: 4 December 2006 / Published online: 10 January 2007 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007 Abstract Herbicide-resistant sweet potato plants were produced through biolistics of embryogenic calli derived from shoot apical meristems. Plant materials were bombarded with the vectors containing the b-glucuronidase gene (gusA) and the herbicide-resistant gene (bar). Selection was carried out using phosphinothricin (PPT). Transformants were screened by the histochemical GUS and Chlorophenol Red as- says. PCR and Southern-blot analyses indicated the presence of introduced bar gene in the genomic DNA of the transgenic plants. When sprayed with Basta, the transgenic sweet potato plants was tolerant to the herbicide. Hence, we report successful transformation of the bar gene conferring herbicide resistance to sweet potato. Keywords Basta Á Biolistics Á Chlorophenol Red Á Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam Á Transformation Introduction Sweet potato [Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam.] ranks as the seventh most important food crop in the world. Traditional plant breeding has contrib- uted to the improvement of sweet potato but, because of its biological complexities, sexual hybridization strategies have not been effective in developing improved cultivars. Therefore, biotechnological approaches including gene transfer are attractive in sweet potato improve- ment. Transgenic sweet potato has been pro- duced by both Agrobacterium-mediated and biolistics using NPTII selection marker (Min et al. 1998; Newell et al. 1995; Prakash and Varadarajan 1992). However, many crop species including sweet potato show higher levels of resistance to the antibiotic agent (Manickavasa- gam et al. 2004; Min et al. 1998). A herbicide- resistance gene as a selectable marker may provide considerable advantage over antibiotic- resistance genes in case where plant tissues may exhibit an intrinsic resistance. The bar gene has been widely used as an effective selectable marker in many crop species, for example, maize (Gordon-Kamm et al. 1990), rice (Cao et al. 1992), wheat (Weeks et al. 1993), sugar- cane (Manickavasagam et al. 2004). The enzyme phosphinothricin N-acetyltransferase (PAT) en- coded by bar detoxifies phosphinothricin (PPT), the active ingredient of herbicides such as G. Yi Á Y.-M. Shin Á G. Choe Á B. Shin Á Y. S. Kim Á K.-M. Kim (&) Kumho Life and Environmental Science Laboratory, Chonnam National University, 1 Oryong-dong, Buk-gu, Gwangju 500-712, Korea e-mail: kmkimus@hanmail.net Y. S. Kim Á K.-M. Kim Agricultural Plant Stress Research Center, Chonnam National University, 300 Yongbong-dong, Buk-gu, Gwangju 500-757, Korea 123 Biotechnol Lett (2007) 29:669–675 DOI 10.1007/s10529-006-9278-1