The Plant Tissue Culture and Transformation Facility consists of over 5,000 square feet of working lab and office space for plant tissue culture and genetic transformation, seven large walk-in culture growth rooms, 17 reach-in, a media kitchen, small equipment room and dedicated greenhouse for generation of transgenic and donor plant materials. High-quality laboratory space to accommodate a researcher’s plant culture needs is provided and available to all researchers.

This facility is available for a wide range of plant transformation systems used by Danforth researchers and visiting scientists. Over the year, the transformation facility staff has been instrumental in developing a portfolio of transformation and tissue culture systems such as: tobacco, petunia, tomato, Arabidopsis, soybean, Indian mustard, maize, rice, cassava, sweet potato, potato, green foxtail millet, sorghum and maize. The facility operates both as a full-service facility where transgenics are produced and delivered by the facility staff or as a self-service facility where researchers can use facility equipment and space for their own specific needs.

The PTF is uniquely positioned in terms of a) location, b) access to expertise, and c) one-of-a-kind laboratory and infrastructure for executing plant transformation and tissue culture workflows under one roof. Moreover, the PTF laboratory space is physically linked to various other relevant core facilities at the Danforth Center, such as plant growth facility, advanced bio-imaging laboratory, mass-spectroscopy & proteomics facility, data science, and phenotyping, including a newly established field research site. Options for exclusive access to specific equipment and lab space to ensure privacy for intellectual property protection allow added advantage to researchers from academic and commercial settings to leverage genome-modification and tissue culture technologies for POC studies for groundbreaking research or to generate new crops with improved traits in the heart of the 39 North Ag innovation ecosystem.