CACAO SOMATIC EMBRYOGENESIS

Cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) has been cultivated for more than 400 years and this crop still faces numerous problems with deseases, pests and the lack of high yielding clone materials.
In vitro culture methods could play an important role to complement existing breeding efforts and to establish cacao plantations with superior germplasm.

Recent progress has now been made on the development of methods for production of somatic embryos (SE) from non-sexual explants (petals and nucellus tissues). Large numbers of SE have been produced and resulting cacao plants have been raised to maturity.
The regeneration rate has been 4.3% for petals, (9,000 explants) and 2.0% for nucellus (29,000 explants).

Since the SE are of non-sexual origin, the progress being reported here offers the opportunity for micropropagation of elite cacao trees.
Mature donor plants could be selectd from segregating field collections and submitted to our cloning process.
Other cacao improvement programs that would rely on cell and molecular genetic techniques can now use these improved methods starting from adults selected donor plants.

II International Symposium on In Vitro Culture and Horticultural Breeding

M.R. Söndahl, S. Liu, C. Bellato, A. Bragin

Micropropagation, Theobroma cacao

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.1993.336.31