Herbicide-tolerant plants

Abstract

This invention relates to herbicide-tolerant plants prepared by plant tissue culture. These plants are produced by culturing tissue of a plant sensitive to a particular herbicide in the presence of an amount of the herbicide, and for a time less than that sufficient to kill the entire plant-tissue population, but sufficient to kill a majority of the tissue population. If desired this procedure is repeated for sufficient passages, preferably with increasing amounts of said herbicide to provide a herbicide-tolerant strain of plant tissue which is subsequently subjected to differentiating growth conditions to provide herbicide-tolerant plants. In a preferred embodiment, plants, which display a heritable tolerance toward said herbicide as compared to the original plant, are selected from the whole population of tissue culture-derived plants. These plants can be propogated vegetatively using tissue culture methods to produce additional plants of the same genetic constitution. These plants also can be sexually reproduced to provide seeds and plants therefrom which display inherited tolerance to said herbicide.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.