East Africa is the largest banana producing and consuming region in Africa. In particular, the East
African Highland Banana serves as the major staple crop of countries like Uganda, but production is
constrained by a number of serious pests and diseases. Banana breeding is a very difficult and slow
process, so genetic engineering offers an alternative approach to improvement. A transformation
system using intercalary meristematic tissues was developed using Agrobacterium strain EHA105
harboring the binary vector pCAMBIA2301 containing the gusA reporter gene and nptII as selectable
marker. In this paper, a new transformation protocol is described that yields kanamycin-resistant, GUSexpressing
banana plants from roughly 10% of the initial explants. The resulting fully-rooted transgenic
plants do not appear to be chimeras since they can be stably propagated, GUS activity is observed
uniformly throughout the plants including the germline cells of the meristem, and PCR and Southern
blots indicate stable integration of the genes into the genome