Doubled Haploid Production in Cereals Using Microspore Culture

Abstract

Doubled haploids are extremely useful in plant breeding since they provide rapid homozygosity. However, the success rate of doubled haploid production in cereals is still not high enough, and there is a special problem involving the formation of high percentage of albino plants. Nevertheless, the success rate in microspore culture in cereals is higher than classical anther cultures, and the method has the advantage of spontaneous chromosome doubling. On the other hand, this method has some critical stages such as pretreatments and microspore isolation, and these stages need to be optimized for the successful use of the technique in plant breeding. For this aim, there have been studies in recent years about combining the pretreatment practices, supplementing growth media with a variety of ingredients, improving the various co-culturing practices and decreasing the albino plant percentage. This technique has been commonly used in the world especially in barley and wheat breeding. Improving the success rate of the technique will be useful for its integration into modern breeding techniques such as apomictic crops and transgenics.