Thiruvananthapuram:Coconut palms grow slowly and are difficult to clone, but scientists at a top Belgian university have claimed a breakthrough in cloning the sixth most cultivated fruit on earth.
The discovery of scientists at K U Leuven and the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT (The Alliance), multiplying seedlings faster and conserving coconut genetic resources for the long-term, is expected to help coconut farmers in countries like India address the challenges in the sector, including Lethal Yellowing Disease, climate change, rising sea levels and outdated plantations.
"This will help preserve coconut palm biodiversity and meet increasing demand for coconuts and derived products", the scientists said in a statement.
"Nobody thought we could do it. But we persevered", said Bart Panis of the Laboratory for Tropical Crop Improvement (KU Leuven) and the Alliance.
Panis and PhD student Hannes Wilms did it, drawing inspiration from another fruit variety: the banana.
From his work on banana plants, Panis suspected that a certain plant hormone could also be successful in coconut palms.
"Coconut plants do not form side shoots. They put all their energy into one shoot that has to grow as fast and as tall as possible. This makes it very difficult to clone and store the plants," Panis said.
For their research, the scientists first extracted the coconut palm embryo from the coconut. They then applied the plant hormone to the meristem - or growing point - contained in the four month old plantlets. In this way, they succeeded in having the plantlet form not only one shoot, but several side shoots. They managed, in turn, to split these shoot clusters and allow new side shoots to grow on them as well.
Their findings were published in Scientific Reports in its September edition.
In an e-mail interview to the media, Wilms, the co-author from KU Leuven, said cloning the coconut palms is not as easy as one may think.
"But our research found that with the right treatment, the palm can be forced to branch," Wilms said.
The researcher said the palm does not grow in Belgium, but since "we are the laboratory of tropical crop improvement, we have a lot of experience working with tropical crops". The project was initially presented as something challenging, "which we of course wanted to tackle."
"The initial aim of our project was to develop a cryopreservation protocol for the safe long term preservation of coconut genetic resources. For this we need, however, a lot of coconut shoots. Since there are no coconut shoots available in Belgium, we had to develop a clonal propagation technique. And the coconut was presented to us as a challenging crop which was not cloneable via classical methods. But my promotor who helped start the project said we'll accept the challenge", Wilms said.
On the application's advantage to coconut growers, he said the method they developed now would be very interesting for the micropropagation of hybrid palms or rare coconut palms such as the "thairu thengai" (curd coconut in India). But of course it could be used to propagate existing dwarf and tall varieties.