<p style="text-align: justify;">The soybean lines A2704-12, A2704-21, and A5547-35 were produced via biolistic transformation of soybean lines with a pUC19 based plasmid containing a modified form of the <i>pat</i> gene under the control of promoter and termination sequences derived from the 35S transcript from cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV). The plasmid was linearized prior to transformation in order to destroy the beta-lactamase (<i>bla</i>) encoding antibiotic resistance marker gene present in the plasmid backbone.</p>

<p style="text-align: justify;">The nucleotide sequence of the <i>pat</i> gene was altered via site-directed mutagenesis in order to reduce the high G:C content (typical for bacterial genes but atypical for plant genes) and generate plant-preferred codons. These sequence modifications did not result in changes to the predicted amino acid sequence of the PAT enzyme.</p>
