Medicago is a main model plant to study root nodule symbiosis and arbuscular mycorrhiza. Since recently more and more research groups use Medicago for plant-pathogen, plant-pest and seed development research. Therefore Medicago is gaining popularity. The main disadvantage of Medicago is time consuming genetics. Medicago is transformable but it's not so easy. To generate a transgenic line is a lot of time and efforts. It always imposes some limitations on any project.

An example is actin related research. Usually postdocs working on a project about actin functionality in plant-microbe interactions do not have time to generate stable transgenic line expressing actin fluorescent reporter and have to use chemical staining or other methods, which are full of artifacts. My idea is to generate Medicago line expressing GFP fusions to the actin-binding domain 2. It is a powerful tool to decipher the role of the actin cytoskeleton in plant development and plant-microbe interactions. Publicly available seeds of this line will help a lot to all researchers who studies actin functionality during symbiosis development or pathogenesis. I can design and create several vectors with constitutive expression of actin reporter or driven by symbiotic specific promoters.