A short review and a preliminary regeneration study of a commercially important Bangladeshi potato variety: Diamant

Abstract

Potato is one of the most important solanaceous tuber crops occupying the fourth position worldwide among all the food crops. Despite not being native to our country, potato production is growing in last few decades. Potato is important to tackle nutritional security as it is a very good source of many essential vitamins, minerals and also, carbohydrate. But with the climate change, salt water intrusion to inland soil and loss of cultivable land, development of high yielding variety of potato with salt tolerance is imperative. Moreover, pathogen infestation is also a problem in production. For this reason, it is essential to increase cultivation and yield of potato in Bangladesh. Plant biotechnology is a good option for improvement. But before proceeding to that, an efficient and reliable protocol for in vitro regeneration is necessary. For this, an extensive study of the existing in vitro protocols was performed here. In light of that, later, nodal explants from a high yielding farmer popular variety, Diamant, was evaluated for regeneration capacity. In terms of shooting response (92.08%), highest shoot length (11.38cm), highest rooting response (98.02%), maximum root length (15.68cm) and survivability percentage after acclimatization in nature (96%), hormone free MS media gave the best response. With increase in concentrations of cytokinins, early shoot initiation occurred but shoots became stunted. However, low concentration of Kn was seen to be favourable in terms of multiple shooting. After acclimatization in nature, highest (96%) percentage of plantlets survived that were cultured in hormone free MS media.