Mature Citrus Facility
The University of Florida, Institute of Food and Agricultural Science (UF/IFAS) and the Citrus Research and Development Foundation (CRDF) established The Mature Citrus Facility (MCF) at the Citrus Research and Education Center (CREC) in Lake Alfred, FL and it started receiving orders for transgenics in 2014. This is a fee-for-service plant production facility for scientists, growers, and industry. Targets include tolerance or resistance to citrus greening or Huanglongbing (HLB), canker and other value-added traits. Mature citrus will flower and fruit earlier than immature citrus, enabling examination of these traits in genetically altered plants.
Mission and goal: Our mission is to accelerate solutions for pests and diseases threatening the Florida citrus industry. Our goal is to produce mature transgenic, cis/intragenic or edited citrus, containing desirable traits for research, testing, and potential commercialization.
Procedures and Services: We routinely use Dr. Leandro Pena’s Agrobacterium based protocol for transformations and gene-editing, but we can also produce cis/intragenics using our own biolistic transformation protocol, free of plant pest sequences, which is an advantage in deregulation. We can also use editing vectors for customers. A variety of mature sweet orange scions can be transformed that enable early flowering and fruiting, and mature rootstock can be utilized for rapid seed production. Shoot-tip-grafting can be employed to clean or introduce new cultivars, or plants vegetatively propagated (budded or rooted). Smaller batches of budsticks can be tested in transformation at a reduced price to determine recalcitrance of the cultivar to Agrobacterium-mediated transformation. Our priority is to produce mature scions resistant to HLB.
Contact Information:
Dr. Janice Zale, Agricultural/Food Scientist IV
University of Florida
700 Experiment Station Road, Room 103
Lake Alfred, Florida 33850
Phone: 863-956-8743
Fax: 863-956-4631
Email: jzale@ufl.edu
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