An Empirical Investigation on the Scope of Genetic Improvement of Lavandula Angustifolia Mill. using Somaclonal Variation in the Context of Indian Agro-Climatic Environment.

Traditional cultivation of lavender occurs through vegetative means in mostly all lavender growing counties of the world. As a result genetic variation in the germplasm is negligible, which offers serious limitations in classical breeding programs of lavender. This led us to explore the potential of plant tissue culture methods (developing somaclonal variants followed by the selection of putative variants) for inducing genetic variation which would eventually serve the purpose of genetic improvement in lavender. Induction of heritable genetic variations in agro-economic traits through in-vitro micropropagation techniques is the main aim of this study.
Sterile cultures of lavender were produced. The regular phases of somaclonal plantlet development i.e. callogenesis followed by caulogenesis, rhizogenesis was modified by an intervening cell suspension culture phase represented by: callogenesis-1 (calli-1 derived from organised structures i.e. explants) followed by the intervening cell suspension culture (derived from calli-1), callogenesis-2 (calli-2 derived from cell suspension culture), caulogenesis (from calli-2), and finally rhizogenesis. The aspect of quantifiability was incorporated by the modified approach. Twenty somaclones exhibited significant differences in twenty one traits reflecting the induction of somaclonal variation within them. Somaclones 5, 6, and 10 among twenty somaclonal variants were genetically improved promising candidates.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Not applicable

The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].

This work did not receive any external funding.