Temperate Fruits and Nuts

Abstract

Successful tissue culture propagation of temperate fruit and nut crops has progressed rapidly since the 1980 Beltsville Conference on tissue culture of fruit plants (94). Almost every year since then a review article has surfaced on recent advances in tissue culture of fruit crops (24, 27, 70, 71, 96, 98). Few reviews have appeared on tissue culture of nut crops (18, 48). These reviews indicate that for a number of our fruit crops, we are past the “how to” stage of in vitro propagation and should concentrate on cost reduction and field performance of tissue cultured plants. Even without the availability of data on field performance, numerous commercial companies have sprung up throughout the world (24, 47, 82, 93, 98) that produce fruit tree rootstocks and to some extent scion cultivars in huge numbers. Still, the feasibility of using tissue culture techniques to propagate temperate fruit and nut crops continues to be a major concern for many research and commercial facilities, because with the exception of apple and peach, minimal numbers of cultivars have been cultured and because numerous problems continue to impede successful in vitro propagation of some fruit and nut crops.KeywordsShoot ProliferationSweet CherryAdventitious Root FormationApple CultivarSour CherryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.