Abstract
Tomato has economic importance and agricultural uses throughout man's history. Tomato consumers are increasing every year. But the rate of growth in tomato production has slowed down. The main objective of this study was to produce transgenic plants of tomato (cv. tomato varieties of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) using a defensing gene isolated from plants as antifungal gene. During this study, we cloned plant defensin gene which we amplified from Phaseolus vulgaris. The Anti-Fungal Protein (AFP) gene was amplified using direct PCR from genomic DNA extract of chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.). Use of transient expression as Agroinjection technique for plant transformation technology of a gene of interest from a foreign source is a valuable technique. For efficient gene expression assay agroinfiltration is a powerful and trustworthy tool and can be utilized with many plant species. The construct beta-glucuronidase (GUS),on pRI201-AN-GUS DNA plasmid. Use pRI201-AN DNA to transform dicotyledonous tomato plant species. The PCR reaction was positive for GUS positive explants and produced the expected amplicons (350bp) corresponding to AFP gene. Thus, our results confirmed a successful introduction of the gene of interest into the tomato genome. Our results from the present study will provide a step ahead to produce transgenic tomato plants in Saudi Arabia against various fungal diseases. Because our protocol is a simple and rapid, we anticipated that our expression system will also be valuable for commercial purposes. It will also provide a valuable research tool to isolate and biochemically characterize broad range of proteins without involving laborious and time consuming regeneration protocols for stable transformation in plants.