Plants with its innumerable benefits have been exploited by mankind for their own well being. Furthermore rapid increase in population has led to an increase in food and energy demand many folds. In comparison to the developed countries food situation in most of the developing countries is precarious. To meet the food demands, production has to be increased and the increased production has to be obtained from a declining cultivable land area.
Plant tissue culture (PTC) holds the key to accelerated food production and medicines by continuous production and supply of plantlets of desired variety/genotype and thereby reducing the use of land area. Micropropagation technology via plant tissue culture provides better approach to raise clones of plants in a large number in which rapid proliferation is achieved and has been widely applied for the production of a large number of economically important plants including valuable medicinal plants, trees, staple food crops, horticultural plants.
However commercialization of such technologies has been
hampered by high production cost (Kozai et al., 1997). The cost of components of tissue culture medium has been also a concern for most commercial laboratories (Babbar and Jain, 2006). The composition of the culture media used for proliferation has a tremendous influence on production costs. Therefore low cost tissue culture technology is the need of the day. Low cost tissue culture technology is the adoption of practices and use of equipments to reduce the unit cost of plant production without compromising the quality of the plants. Agar and sucrose are the chief constituents which play a significant role in cost of production. Attempts have been made for the use of cheaper alternatives of agar like starch, gelrite and isabgol (Pierik, 1991; Gebre and Sathyanarayana, 2001; Kodym and Zapata, 2001; Nagamori and Kobayashi, 2001; Jain and Babbar, 2006, 2011; Raghu et al., 2007). The low cost alternatives of sucrose (Bonaobra et al, 1994; Agrawal etal., 2009) such as household sugar and other sugar sources can be used to reduce the cost of medium. Table sugar as an alternative low cost medium component for in vitro micro-propagation of potato; Solanum tuberosum L. was used by Demo et al., (2008).
Reduction in the cost of basal salts can also contribute to the reduction in the unit price of tissue cultured plants. In an attempt to achieve this and to reduce the cost of tissue cultured plants, Biswas and Biswas (2009) developed and patented (Patent No. 1113/del/2009 dated 01/06/2009) a novel plant tissue culture medium KFA and KFA plus using Flyash as the main source of inorganic constituent in the medium. In general, 95-98% of FA consists oxides of Si, Al, Ca and about 0.5-3.5% of Na, P, and S (Grey and Lin, 1972,). Jala (2006) revealed useful ameliorant nature of FA, improves properties of problem soils. It is a source of readily available plant macronutrients like K, P, Ca, Mg, S. and micronutrients like Fe, Zn, Cu, Mo, B, Mn. In the present study it was used in various combinations with and without nitrogen source, and plant growth regulators. To study the efficacy of this media varying percentage of flyash was used for micropropagation of Mentha arvensis and M. spicata. Mentha species are considered highly popular industrial crops as they are a source of essential oils enriched in certain monoterpenes, widely used in food, flavor, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries. Plantlets derived from tissue culture are known to exhibit somaclonal variation (Larkin and Scowcroft, 1981), which is often heritable. Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) and microsatellite polymorphism analysis can be used to detect variation at DNA level (Zhang et al., 2001; Yadav et al., 2012). Genetic homogeneity studies of the regenerated plants were carried out using PCR based Microsatellite polymorphism.
No comments:
Post a Comment