The feasibility of obtaining a transgenic plant lay in overcoming two problems that were present in the early 1980s, both of which Chilton's experiment successfully solved: on the one hand, researchers needed to obtain a whole plant after having infected it with Agrobacterium , and on the other, the plant had to express the foreign genes that had been inserted into it.
La factibilidad de obtener una planta transgénica radicaba en la superación de dos problemas que se presentaban a principios de 1980 y que el experimento de Chilton lograba solucionar. Por un lado, obtener una planta entera luego de haberla infectado con Agrobacterium y, por otro, que esa planta expresara los genes foráneos que se le habían introducido.