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#PlantScienceClassics #6: The T-DNA. In a 1977 paper, Mary-Dell Chilton & colleagues identify the Transferred DNA (T-DNA), the bit of DNA that Agrobacterium tumefaciens inserts into the plant genome, to kick off the race toward the first transgenic plant. doi.org/10.1016/0092-8… 
It was known since before the 1940s, that Agrobacterium could induce tumors (‘crown galls’) on plants, & that these tumors then grow autonomously of the bacterium, meaning that the plant had been permanently ‘transformed’. But the molecular details for the process were not known.
Armin Braun already speculated in 1947 that DNA may be involved in this transformation process. But research really took off in 1967, when Rob Schilperoort showed that Agrobacterium RNA could hybridize with crown gall DNA,indicating that bacterial DNA had indeed been transferred.
