Increase in vitamin levels to improve shoot growth of diploid, triploid and tetraploid taro cultured in liquid medium

Abstract

Taro (Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott) is one of important food crop in many countries including Indonesia, which has big diversity of taro germplasm. Tissue culture is an in vitro technique to mass-propagated propagules. Modification of the medium compositions is required to obtain the best growth of plantlets. This research was aimed to accelerate growth of taro shoot cultures by increasing of the vitamin levels added on MS liquid medium using three different ploidy levels of taro. Experiments were designed by increasing three kind of vitamin B i.e. thiamine, pyridoxine and nicotinic acid to 100-fold of the normal concentrations. Shoots were cultured for 4 weeks. Growth was determined by recording shoot numbers, petiole length, leaf and root numbers of culture. The results showed that increase in vitamin B levels affected growth of taro culture. Increase in nicotinic acid gave the best petiole length for Bentul diploid (5.39 cm), increase in pyridoxine concentration enhanced root numbers (6.7 roots). For Satoimo triploid, increase in thiamine combined with nicotinic acid gave the best for root numbers (8.7 roots). For Bentul tetraploid, increase in pyridoxine accelerated shoot numbers (1.3 shoots). Growth of Satoimo triploid was the best compared to both Bentul diploid and tetraploid.