Intact ungerminated spores or germinating swollen spores of
Mucor circinelloides were biolistically transformed to leucine
prototrophy
with the autonomous replicating plasmids pLeu4 and pMCL1302. The former
developmental stage was efficiently transformed with
both plasmids. The existence of pLeu4 sequences, as selfreplicating elements,
within Leu+ transformants was established by Southern
analysis and by the recovery of plasmid pLeu4 in bacteria transformed with
total DNA from M. circinelloides transformants. This is
the first report of the transformation of intact cells of a member
of the Zygomycetes.