I am working on getting E. coli conjugation going with unicellular eukaryotes such as 

https://peerj.com/preprints/3321.pdf

and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211926418310919. Any interest in this approach?

On Sunday, March 24, 2019 at 2:05:23 PM UTC-4, Andreas "Mega" Stuermer wrote:

Hi guys, 

Seems there are new plant transformation kids on the block. It seems that all you have to do in order to get transgenic plants, you can decoat the seeds and put agrobacterium onto it. Then select on kanamycin and you get your transgenic plant. 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323492015_Efficient_method_of_seed_transformation_via_Agrobacterium_tumefaciens_for_obtaining_transgenic_plants_of_Hibiscus_cannabinus_L 

Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated in planta seed transformation strategy in sugarcane.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23749098 

Now the products of agrobacterium are regulated in the US. To try out an alternative route that doesn't fall under the plant pest regulation, I'm gathering community labs in the US (and any other nation where this is legal) to try out a new method based on this. 

The basic idea is to use carbon-nanotube+PEI complexes to get DNA into plant cells as described in the paper "High aspect ratio nanomaterials enable delivery of functional genetic material without DNA integration in mature plants" by Demirer et al. 2019.

The DNA gets into the seed cells, as it would with agrobacterium.  But it doesn't integrate, so we employ a transposon to make the gene-of-interest jump into a plant chromosome. 

This is like a Independent-Bio-crowdsourcing project. I guess pretty open source, because maybe life should be about more than making products. 

Everybody who wants to participate, lmk. We are group-ordering PEI and CNT (pretty affordably) and will get the plasmids synthesized together too. If we get a few more people, PEI will be 50% off in bulk. It's 95$ for 5mL (way too much mL to ever use probably) without bulk discount.