Plant transformation has enabled fundamental insights into plant biology and revolutionized commercial agriculture. Unfortunately, for most crops, transformation and regeneration remain arduous even after more than thirty years of technological advances. Genome editing provides new opportunities to enhance crop productivity, but relies on genetic transformation and plant regeneration, which are bottlenecks in the process. Herein we review the state of plant transformation and point to innovations needed to enable genome editing in crops. Plant tissue culture methods need optimization and simplification for efficiency and minimize time in culture. Currently, specialized facilities exist for crop transformation. Single cell and robotic techniques should be developed for high throughput genomic screens. Utilization of plant genes involved in developmental reprogramming, wound response, and/or homologous recombination could boost recovery of transformed plants. Engineering universal Agrobacterium strains and recruitment of other microbes, such as Ensifer or Rhizobium, could facilitate delivery of DNA and proteins into plant cells. Synthetic biology should be employed for de novo design of transformation systems. Genome editing is a potential game-changer in crop genetics when plant transformation systems are optimized.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 65. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 13 October 2026.
All research outputs
#838,432
of 34,652,893 outputs
Outputs from Plant Cell
#114
of 8,102 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#11,470
of 344,771 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Plant Cell
#2
of 62 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,652,893 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 97th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 8,102 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 10.8. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 98% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 344,771 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 96% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 62 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 96% of its contemporaries.
