Date Palm Micropropagation via Organogenesis

The world demand for date palm vitro-plants has increased in recent decades. The use of all available techniques of rapid multiplication to fulfill this demand is an objective of great interest. However, the technique used should permit maximum fidelity in terms of genetic stability of regenerated plants. Hence, organogenesis presents an advantage of use of low concentrations of plant growth regulators and consequently the callus phase is avoided. Direct regeneration of vegetative buds minimizes the risk of somaclonal variation among regenerants. Moreover, the duration of culture period is limited by frequent renewal of the plant material. Actually, there are few laboratories that use this technique to produce date palm vitro-plants at the commercial level. Hundreds of thousands of date palm vitro-plants have been produced using this technique mainly in Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Research has permitted development of this micropropagation process and to adapt it to the most important date palm cultivars. In the present study, a review of the literature and our research results on date palm tissue culture, with emphasis on the organogenesis technique, are presented. The entire multiplication process from offshoot removal to plantlet acclimatization is fully described.