Protocols for Micropropagation of Woody Trees and Fruits

CHAPTER 25
APRICOT MICROPROPAGATION
O. PÉREZ-TORNERO 1 AND L. BURGOS 2
1 Departamento de Cultivos Leñosos, IMIDA, 30150 Murcia, Spain. 2 Departamento
de Mejora de Frutales. CEBAS-CSIC. PO Box 164, 30100, Murcia, Spain.
E-mail: burgos@cebas.csic.es
1. INTRODUCTION
Apricot (Prunus armeniaca L.) is the second most important species of the stone
fruits, although far behind peach and very much geographically located by its
peculiar ecological needs. During the last years the world production of apricot fruit
has oscillated around 2.5 million tons, and more than half of world production
concentrated in the Mediterranean basin countries.
Micropropagation has been applied to the commercial production of fruit and
nut crops since the late 1970s. Initially, it was used for small (soft) fruit crops such
as strawberry and raspberry and for the rootstocks of several tree fruit species,
especially peach (Zimmerman & Debergh, 1991). Apricot is well suited for in vitro
propagation because cuttings are difficult to root and scions are currently budded
onto apricot seedlings (Reighard et al., 1990). Therefore, growing apricots on their
own roots appears to be a logical undertaking. Very little, however, has been
reported on the tissue culture of this species and most of it is relatively recent. Most
commercial production of micropropagated fruit trees has been focused on the
production of rootstocks. Although grafting of scions onto seedling rootstocks is a
common practice, the production of scions on their own roots has been limited. To
our knowledge, apricot cultivars have never been commercially micropropagated,
and also apricot rootstocks. Only one small Spanish company has been producing
small quantities of selected apricot cultivars on their own roots, for the last 2 years.
Here we describe a protocol containing different steps necessary to micropropagate
apricot cultivars. It has proven useful for most cultivars tested although often some
parameters have to be optimized for each single cultivar. When parameters
depended on the genotype, it is indicated in the text and a range is provided.
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S.M. Jain and H. Häggman (eds.), Protocols for Micropropagation of Woody Trees and Fruits, 267–278.
© 2007 Springer.