Fruit Improvement Through Single Cell Culture

Abstract

Many fruit cultivars, although widely grown and popular with the public, are found to be deficient for certain characteristics such as disease and insect resistance, pigmentation, time of harvest, fruit set, nutritive value, storage ability, etc. Cultivar improvement for such characters has traditionally been approached from two directions: 1) using the sexual system to produce variable populations from which improved forms of the original cultivar can be selected, and 2) the use of mutagens (both chemical and physical) on clonal plants to produce mutants which will represent an improved form of the parental plant.