- Mieke Van Lijsebettens: Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Ghent University, Gent, Belgium. milij@psb.ugent.be.
In 1983, the first transgenic tissues and plants were generated by means of disarmed Agrobacterium tumefaciens strains, in which the oncogenes had been replaced by antibiotic resistance markers. Hence, this Special Issue of The International Journal of Developmental Biology celebrates 30 years of transgenic research in plants! Eminent scientists working in the field of plant transformation or plant biotechnology have contributed to this publication and reviewed the state of the art of their particular subdomain or summarized the importance of transgenic research in the discovery of new mechanisms and the establishment of an entirely new field, such as epigenetics.