The Plant Transformation Facility
Agronomy Hall
The Plant Transformation Facility was founded at Iowa State University in 1995 and is housed in Agronomy Hall on the Northeast side of campus. The facility started with 3 full time employees focusing on biolistic-mediated maize transformation. Now it has grown to include 6 full time employees, in addition to postdoctoral research associates, visiting scholars, graduate students, and student hourly workers concentrating in maize, rice and soybean transformation and research programs for the improvement of Iowa crops.
 11 flow benches with the capacity for 20 people at once |
 5 labs with 2600 square feet of space |
4 growth chambers and 14 incubators to house transgenic cultures and plantlets.
The facility consists of 5 laboratory rooms (2600 square feet) and 4 storage rooms (1000 square feet). The labs are comfortably accommodated with 11 laminar flow benches, 14 temperature controlled incubators for tissue culture plates, and 4 Conviron growth chambers for plantlets. The service laboratory is set up to perform biolistic and Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of maize and Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of soybean and rice.
4500 square feet of greenhouse space for corn and soybean used to capacity
Rice plants are primarily grown in the growth chambers due to day length requirements while the maize and soybean plants are housed in a 3000 square foot greenhouse on a 16:8 light cycle. Currently, all laminar flow benches, incubators, growth chambers, and greenhouses are used at full capacity.
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In the summer months, PTF has field facility for growing maize and soybean to increase donor seed materials for transformation.
