July 19, 2022 09:19
The General Secretariat of the Khalifa International Award for Date Palm and Agricultural Innovation organized yesterday a virtual scientific lecture entitled Genetic Changes in Date Palm Propagation by Tissue Culture Techniques.
The lecture was presented by Dr. Abdullah bin Abdullah, project manager for the development of sustainable production systems for date palms in the countries of the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (ICARDA), in the presence of 62 experts, specialists and those interested in palm cultivation and date production in general, representing 20 countries.
Dr. Abdullah bin Abdullah reviewed the reasons for the occurrence of genetic changes that produce palm tree fistool and its relationship to the techniques used, laboratories and recommendations that can be made to avoid mutations and for farmers when purchasing tissue cuttings.
He added that the date palm tree reproduces as all plants, either by the method of seed reproduction / mating or sexual / and generates genetically different offspring or it takes place through the nucleus and is called vegetative reproduction / non-breeding / and this produces offspring genetically compatible with the original and is carried out through offspring, which is the most widely used and one of its methods is tissue culture that It means growing a cell, tissue or even a plant organ within glass containers that contain a balanced nutritional environment and under sterile environmental conditions and controlled in terms of temperature and lighting in order to produce a complete plant.
The lecturer emphasized that tissue culture techniques have many advantages as they respond to the increasing demands on the cuttings, as they produce a large number of plants of the same variety / or from one shoot / and give offshoots usually genetically identical to each other and identical to the mother as they are free of diseases and thus provide transmissible offshoots It is characterized by the presence of a radical group that increases its success rate in the sustainable orchard and helps to speed up growth and provides investment opportunities of good economic feasibility.
Despite these advantages, he added, the techniques of palm propagation by tissue culture have some problems represented in the emergence of some physiological and morphological abnormalities that appear in date palms of embryonic and asexual origin, and this situation has already begun to cause some financial losses for palm farmers and embarrassment for the concerned commercial laboratories.
Dr. Abdullah pointed out that various techniques have been developed and applied to study the matching of histological offspring of the mother palm. These techniques include histological and enzymatic examination, molecular biology / genetic fingerprinting techniques. However, verification using morphological characteristics remains the commonly used method to ascertain whether plants obtained from tissue culture are identical. To class the mother palm or not.
Source: wam
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