The federal agency, USDA APHIS, will issue new guidance about the deregulation & environmental release of transgenics produced with plant pest sequences (35S promoter, Nos terminator, T-DNA borders) in the near future, which will significantly decrease the time & cost to release transgenics to the growers. This is extremely important for the citrus industry because Agrobacterium-mediated transgenics with plant pest sequences that are being field tested now could theoretically be commercialized, relatively soon. The FDA & EPA will still examine these plants. The final report of the external review of the transformation labs was received & it concluded that both transformation labs are necessary & do not have to be merged. This is encouraging since our objectives are completely different. However, now we are faced with what might be a formal split between the CRDF & UF over the role of direct support organizations. The Mature Citrus Facility produced ~85 transgenics this quarter, which is a significant increase in productivity & we are not sure what caused this increase. Use of the gfp reporter in some transformations, which makes transgenics easier to identify likely contributed somewhat to this increase, & the fact that it was spring when our productivity naturally increases probably contributed. We always seem to produce more transgenics during spring. However, not all will grow large enough for micrografting & only 57 transgenics have been micrografted thus far. Of these 57 shoots, 30 will definitely survive. I submitted a research proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF). It will take ~6 months to review & ~7% of proposals are funded. In collaboration with another scientist, a letter of intent was submitted to USDA AFRI for another research proposal. I contacted many scientists to advertise our services but have heard back from few. In the future, after transgenics have been made for current customers, our prices will increase to better cover operating costs. Our biolistic transformation manuscript in In Vitro Cellular & Developmental Biology is finally in press. It took a long time for this journal to review & publish the manuscript. Currently we are working on other manuscripts with other UF CREC scientists. We have introduced additional new cultivars from the UF Plant Improvement Team & other breeders. EV2, WP Murcott, Valquarius, OLL4 scions have been introduced. OLL4 & Valquarius have very high Agrobacterium transformation efficiency. UF 15, UF 17, X639, US 942 rootstocks were introduced & are being tested in Agrobacterium transformations. We also recently introduced several grapefruit cultivars (Flame, Marsh, Ray Ruby & Duncan). In the past, grapefruit (Ray Ruby, Grosser’s Red Grapefruit, & Ruby Red Grapefruit) were recalcitrant using the standard Agrobacterium protocol.