Genetic Transformation of Pineapple

Transgenic pineapple plants have been produced for the purpose of improving various economically important traits. The efforts have focused on traits such as natural flowering control, herbicide tolerance for weed control, disease and nematode control, and fruit quality traits. The fruit quality traits include increased iron and zinc levels, chilling-induced fruit browning, and increased carotenoids. Numerous constructs and approaches have been used in this normally vegetatively propagated crop. The major bottleneck for high-throughput gene functional analyses of pineapple is nucleic acid delivery and tissue culture/regeneration system. Though tissue culture is widely used commercially to increase planting material, this is slow, and the development of a plantlet following transformation culture has shown significant varietal differences and somaclonal variation. In this chapter, we focus on reviewing the technical aspects of the published transformation processes with the intention to provide practical information for planning pineapple transformation experiments.