Overview of In vitro Strategies to Conserve Rare and Endangered Plant Species in India

Abstract

India is one of the seventeen mega-diverse countries in the world. The maximum diversity in India has been observed in the Eastern Himalaya, Eastern part of Western Himalaya and the Western Ghats with its endemism. However, due to intrinsic and extrinsic factors, there has been a reduction in the number of species that are threatened, rare and endangered. Therefore, to sustain the populations of these species, immediate action of conservation is required. Biotechnological approaches have been recognized as an efficient method to conserve the rare and endangered plant species. In the present study, a Google search was carried out along with other scientific databases such as PubMed, SciFinder, Web of Science, and Google Scholar to accomplish a scientific literature search and analysis. In this review, we have described a few potential in vitro methods to protect rare and endangered flowering plants such as tissue culture using different explants, nuclear-DNA assay, cold storage techniques and gene banks. These various strategies are known to have a significant role in the production of a number of plantlets with their quality traits which considerably shows the scope to accomplish the research gap.