Importance of micropropagation in pineapple for disease free plantlets and rapid multiplication

Abstract

Pineapple (Ananas comosus) is a delicious tropical fruit with a superior flavor and high nutritive value. It is one of the most important commercial fruit crops in the world. Pineapple is propagated by vegetative means from basal, stem slip, and crown suckers with varying degrees of success. The traditional methods of propagation would take 8 years to obtain enough planting materials from one mother plant to plant just only a half hectare. Plant tissue culture methods have been successfully applied to pineapple and it is an efficient method for rapid in vitro clonal propagation. Micro-propagation of pineapple plants also has many advantages, such as, it allows rapid increase of selected varieties, overcomes serious diseases causing considerable production losses of pineapple at the time of planting material preparation disease free plants and increase the multiplication rate of elite genotypes.