18/11/21 – Biotechnological Approaches in Asexually Reproduced Crops

The CIOPORA Breeding Academy is an education program designed specifically for plant breeders and R&D departments of the breeding companies. It provides advanced training in the latest breeding technologies, including New Breeding Techniques (NBT).

Webinar Syllabus: Plant biotechnology can be defined in many ways but in this webinar, the emphasis will be on plant tissue culture and transformation techniques.

The tissue culture technique enables the growth and maintenance of plant cells, tissues, organs, embryos, protoplasts, or seeds in a sterile and controlled environment. It has been in practical use since the 1970s and allows rapid production of many identical offspring (clones) of one plant, also called micropropagation. This type of asexual propagation is of importance for a large number of ornamental plants and trees like navel oranges, which were obtained by mutagenesis or are unable to reproduce sexually through seeds. This webinar will also provide an overview of other applications of tissue culture for the breeding of horticulture plants, such as disease elimination; anther/pollen culture for the production of haploid plants; protoplast isolation for hybrid production; embryo culture, and synthetic seed production. In the era of genome editing, transformation techniques beyond the widely-applied Agrobacterium-based protocols will also be discussed.