TISSUE CULTURE STUDIES ON MULBERRY

Mulberry is a perennial woody plant of immense importance in silk industry,due to its foliage that constitutes the basic food for silkworms. Mulberry improvement programmes have been hampered due to long life cycle,heterozygosity,polyploidy,dioecy and extensive out breeding. It takes several years to evolve a clone with desirable traits through conventional techniques. Moreover,there is tremendous shortage of high yielding,disease free planting materials of mulberry varieties,availability of natural haploids to evolve superior hybrids is scanty and adequate efforts have not yet been made to explore the possibility of encapsulating vegetative propagules in mulberry.Keeping this in view, the present study was undertaken for developing repeatable in vitro protocols for micropropagation,production of gynogenic haploids and synthetic seeds using vegetative propagules of mulberry variety-S54 (Morus indica L.). This book will be useful to students, academicians and researchers alike. The protocols developed can be utilised for evolving high yielding, superior and newer plant varieties and for ex-situ germplasm conservation of other commercially useful plants.