So other techniques, such as shooting pellets coated with DNA, are being used as a means of delivering DNA into plant cells. However, this technique is labor-intensive, expensive, and fraught with other problems. From a basic science standpoint, we'd like to understand why Agrobacterium does not transform these plants efficiently. Because if we could understand this, we could modify Agrobacterium to make a much more useful tool in plant genetic engineering. We've been working on rice as a model system.
Rice is relatively easy to work with in terms of tissue culture, but it's still fairly tricky.
In 1994 a group of scientists in Japan reported an efficient Agrobacterium transformation system for rice. It gives us great satisfaction to know that it can be done. Although we always believed that Agrobacterium could transfer its DNA into monocots, some respected scientists had stated very openly that it would be a waste of time to consider using Agrobacterium to transform monocots. The Japanese report has proved them wrong. In the near future, probably some of the same kinds of genes that are being put into dicots, such as resistance to viruses and resistance to insect pests.