ISHS Acta Horticulturae 736: III International Date Palm Conference
QUANTITY AND QUALITY COMPARISON OF OFFSHOOT AND TISSUE CULTURED BARHEE DATE PALM TREES |
| Author: | S. Hajian |
| Keywords: | commercial cultivars, plantations, production, export |
| Abstract:
Barhee is one of the most commercial and popular date cultivars in the world. The province of Khuzestan in the southwest of Iran is one of the main producing regions of this cultivar but many of the plantations were damaged during the Iraq and Iran war (1980-1989). Therefore, in order to renew these plantations and also to restore the old ones, the government prepared and distributed many tissue cultured plantlets of Barhee date cultivar in this region. Many date growers who were worried about the incidence of abnormalities (genetic and epi-genetic changes) in these trees, were not interested in using tissue cultured plantlets. These abnormalities relate to modifications of chromosome structure during the in-vitro propagation process that may affect some properties of the tree and its fruit, such as shape, color, size and sugar content of fruits, and growth pattern of the tree like height, trunk diameter, number of leaves, leaflets and thorns, or their position. Therefore this study was carried out using tissue culture offshoot propagated Barhee date palms from 1999 to 2002 on a date palm germplasm collection of Date Palm & Tropical Fruits Research Institute of Iran at Ahwaz city, using a completely randomized design with 12 replications. The results showed significant differences in only 16 of the 97 evaluated characteristics of the two groups. There were no important morphological changes related to genetic abnormalities in the trees propagated by tissue culture technique. | |
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