ABSTRACT
Bananas are propagated vegetatively using suckers or corms. The rate of multiplication of suckers is slow and variety dependent. Suckers may be infected with diseases and pests and are transferred to new fields. In vitro technique of banana embryo culture involves surface sterilizing of banana seeds, aseptically cracking them to extract the embryos, and culturing the embryos on appropriate nutrient medium and growth conditions to induce germination. Micropropagation of plants has many advantages over conventional methods of vegetative propagation, which suffer from several limitations. Tissue-culture systems allow propagating plant material with high multiplication rates in an aseptic environment. Micropropagation has played a key role in plantain and banana improvement programs worldwide. Planting material derived from micropropagation performs equal to or superior to conventional material. Since the somaclonal variants appear to be heritable, and some somaclonal variants are also meiotically transmissible, genome scanning techniques have been applied to banana to identify DNA variations associated with somaclonal variation.
