Developments in Brief : Bacteria Seen as Aid in Improving Plants

Scientists have shown for the first time that certain bacteria can be used to transfer foreign genes into plants of a family that includes corn, wheat and other important food crops. The feat, they said, may pave the way for using genetic engineering techniques to modify plants in such a way as to make them resistant to disease.

The new study reports the adaptation to corn, which is a member of the grass family, of a genetic engineering technique using the organism agrobacterium. That bacterium has been widely used for the genetic alteration of other families of plants.

Grasses had been considered resistant to agrobacterium, said Roger Beachy, a Washington University biologist. But the new results suggest that is not true, he said in a report in the current issue of the British journal Nature.