Improvement of Crop Plants through in vitro Techniques

Darshini Trivedi; Aruna Joshi

Abstract

There has been a great demand for high-yielding, disease-free planting stock for agricultural, forestry, plantation and horticulture crops with improved quality. In vitro tissue culture techniques has emerged as a viable tool for the improvement of crops. The various in vitro techniques utilized for crop improvement includes: micropropagation which helps in large scale production, meristem culture which can effectively remove pathogens from plants, embryo culture can overcome the post-zygotic failure which in turn eliminates problems like low seed set, seed dormancy, and sexual incompatibility by embryo rescue. Somatic hybridization through protoplast culture has regenerated unique hybrid plants which were otherwise difficult to be produced through conventional sexual hybridization. Anther culture has led to haploids and dihaploid production within a short time. Somaclonal variation, another method for improvement of crops has proved to be useful to the plant breeder as it improves the accessibility of existing germplasm and regenerates variants with altered genetic traits. Modern techniques like tissue culture‐based genetic transformations has been commercially exploited for developing transgenic varieties in several crop species. Today many crop species are being propagated on large scale through tissue culture technique, providing millions of plants in the market with improved yield and quality.

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