We have constructed a chimeric gene consisting of the promoter, first exon, and first intron of a maize ubiquitin gene Although the production of transgenic rice plants has been reported by a number of laboratories (1,4,6,13,17,19,24,26,28,30), the regeneration of fertile, stably transformed rice has yet to be made routine and efficient.In many plant transformation studies, drug resistance genes such as neomycin phosphotransferase or hygromycin phosphotransferase have been used as selectable markers (19,24,25,28). One recent altemative strategy that has emerged is based on the use of marker genes that confer resistance to herbicides (7,8,10,11).