Agrobacterium tumefaciens is a gram-negative soil bacterium, which can cause crown gall

tumors at wound sites of infected dicotyledonous plants. During the infection, A.

tumefaciens can transfer part of its Ti plasmid to the plant cells. The Ti plasmid, also referred to
as T-DNA, can be induced to integrate into the plant nuclear genome randomly by a set of
virulence (vir) genes, which are also located on the Ti plasmid. The Ti plasmid is widely used to
transfer A. tumefaciens genes into plants. A. tumefaciens can also mediate transfer of the Ti
plasmid to the yeast S. cerevisiae (Bundock, den Dulk-Ras, Beijersbergen, & Hooykaas, 1995).
The precision of T-DNA integration has extended the use of A. tumefaciens to mediate gene
transfer in filamentous fungi, and it has been demonstrated that the gene transfer mechanism in
some filamentous fungi is similar to that in plants and yeast (de Groot, Bundock, Hooykaas, &
Beijersbergen, 1998). However, the transformation frequencies vary among different
filamentous fungi. For Aspergillus giganteus ATMT has been demonstrated to be more efficient
than the PEG-mediated protoplast transformation, while electroporation and biolistic
transformation were ineffective (Meyer, Mueller, Strowig, & Stahl, 2003). A different result was
obtained for A. niger in that ATMT was less efficient than direct DNA transfer (Sugui et al.,
2005). These findings suggest that for a given species, each method should be tested for
efficiency.