An Overview of Oil Palm Cultivation via Tissue Culture Technique

Abstract

During the last three decades, plant cell, tissue, and organ culture have developed rapidly and become a major biotechnology tool in agriculture, horticulture, forestry, and industry. Many problems in conventional breeding techniques were solved via tissue culture techniques. Plant tissue culture technique permits the growing plants in test tube or closed container in vitro under controlled environment. This technique is devoted to solve two problems: 1) To keep the plant cells free from microbes. 2) To grow the desired plants by providing suitable nutrient medium and other environmental conditions. In this chapter, a review around plant tissue culture techniques that have been reported on oil palm breeding programme will be discussed. It is including the laboratory techniques, advantages and disadvantages of the technique, the problems to produce good and prolific oil palm tissue culture clones and mitigation measures that have been reported to overcome the problems. As a conclusion, this chapter reviews tissue culture techniques that could be used to propagate oil palm clones.