Table 5. Effects of different pretreatment time of onion before Agrobacterium infection.

Pretreatment time	Transient transformation efficiencies (%) by using infiltration of Agrobacterium concentration (OD600 = 0.10) with different agroinfiltration durations
	24 h	48 h	72 h	96 h
0 h	2.78±0.052 cC	5.97±0.066 cC	8.74±0.056 dC	5.20±0.048 dD
24 h	8.10±0.068 bB	15.01±0.158 bB	24.10±0.279 cB	13.17±0.272 cC
48 h	12.93±0.203 aA	22.43±0.436 aA	42.40±0.309 bA	15.77±0.298 bB
72 h	13.03±0.286 aA	22.10±0.480 aA	43.57±0.513 aA	17.71±0.276 aA

Note: three repeat samples for each treatment were investigated by observing ten 2 mm² epidermal areas of each sample. Each efficiency value represents the mean of transformation efficiencies of thirty replicates of 2 mm² epidermal areas from three samples (the percentage of positive cells in total cells per unit area), and the standard errors were calculated by using Excel. Different capital and lowercase letters within the same column exhibit significant difference at the 1% and 5% probability level according to the Duncan test of SPSS 10.0 statistic analysis.