| Forage grasses are the main animal feeds for herbivores, and they are also the foundation of stock farming. But in recent years, owing to the degeneration and desertification of the grasslands, together with the plague of grasshoppers, it aggravated the ecological environment of grassland, which has become a major obstacle for the maintenance of pasturage in northwest of China. As a migrating pest, the grasshopper is very difficult to be controlled. The chemical control costs too much with unsatisfied results and some safety problems on food and ecosystem. So the fundamental way to control this pest is to select a cultivar against grasshoppers, which is confined by the long selection cycle and the deficiency of genotypes with resistance. Gene engineering is an adequate strategy to create new breeding cultivars by isolating and transforming useful locust resistance-related genes with the advantages of a short term and free restriction from reproductive barriers, which is an important field of the genetic improvement for the forage grasses.In our study, the calli of Elymus breviaristatus and Elymus sibiricus L.cv. 'chuancao No. 2 are used as receptor materials. Through the mediation of Nodule Agrobacterium, the insecticidal protein gene (ppip) from pseudomonas pseudoalcalgenes has been transformed into the receptor materials to develop a new transgenic forage grass with the character of grasshopper resistance. The main results are as follows:... |
