**HELP!** Plant growth medium contamination

[David C. Logan]

Hedley wrote:

>My colleague and I are trying to grow Arabidopsis seeds under sterile 
>conditions to provide us with tissue for protoplast production and 
>transient 
>transformation. Help! We are having great difficulty in getting the  
>seeds 
>sterile. We're following an established protocol for sterilisation  
>where the 
 >seeds are etc etc (deleted)

It is possible that your seed is contaminated with fungi internally 
(i.e. inside the testa) if this is the case (as seems possible since 
your sterilization procedure is quite rigorous) then you will not 
eliminate the fungi by any SURFACE sterilization method and the way to 
proceed in my opinion would be to order new seed from e.g. the 
Nottingham stock centre. Sorry for the pesimism.

 


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david.logan at plants.ox.ac.uk

David C. Logan
Department of Plant Science
University of Oxford
South Parks Road
Oxford
OX1 3RB

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