Production of Virus Free Potato Plants Using Meristem Culture from Cultivars Grown under Jordanian Environment

Abstract

Meristem culture has become a powerful and successful tool for virus elimination from infected plants and has been successfully applied in potato. A total of 70 potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) tubers for each of three cultivars that grown in Jordan were obtained from the Ministry of Agriculture and subjected to enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) test for detection of virus infection. The percentage of infection with Potato virus Y (PVY) was 21.4%, 15.7 %, 12.8% for Spunta, Alaska and Safrane cultivars, respectively. Meristem culture was applied on infected potato tubers for all the three cultivars. Results of shoots and roots development indicated that medium supplemented with 0.5 mg/l of Indole butyric acid (IBA) was the best for shoots length with mean (7.71 cm), roots length with mean (9.41 cm), number of shoots with mean (2.60) and number of leaves with mean (15.40). ELISA results for in vitro produced plantlets showed that all tested plantlets were PVY free. Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) was successfully amplified the coat protein gene of PVY virus in the infected samples and confirm the ELISA result. The Acclimatization of the plantlets that generated from in vitro shoots and roots multiplication stage revealed 90% of successful with Spunta cultivar and 80% with both Alaska and Safrane cultivars.