Prospects and Limitations of Synthetic Seeds

Abstract

Synthetic seed technology is one of the most important tools to breeders and scientists of plant tissue culture. It provides a powerful advantage of rapid and large scale multiplication, minimum labour, and low cost propagation of seed less, hybrid, and many vegetatively propagated readily infected plants. This technology is useful in multiplying transgenic plants, somatic and cytoplasmic hybrids, sterile and unstable genotypes and also for cryopreservation of desirable elite genotype. It is not successful in some of the horticultural crops seeds propagation as; some seeds are minute in size and heterozygosity of seeds particularly in most of the cross pollinated crops, eg; orchids, presence of minimized endosperm, some seeds essential mycorrhizal fungi association for germination eg: orchids, no seeds are formed. These crop species can be multiplied vegetatively by producing synthetic seeds. These can be somatic embryos, enfolded cell aggregates, shoot buds, or any other type of tissue that may be effectiveness for planting materials or that has capability to develop into a plant under in situ or ex situ conditions and that can retain storage potentiality (Capuano et al., 1998). An embryo produced by somatic embryogenesis is kept in a synthetic seed that has an artificial seed covering, artificial medium that provides nutrition, and an artificial seed. The term "synthetic seed" was first used in 1977 by Toshio Murashige.  The first artificial seeds were created in 1982 by Kitto and Janick using somatic carrot embryos. This method is necessary to reproduce hybrids because plants cannot multiply or produce seeds. It also allows for the production of male or female sterile plants, elite genotypes of disease-free plants, conservation of recalcitrant species, transgenic plants, etc.

Cite as:

Sanjoy Kumar Bordolui. (2024). Prospects and Limitations of Synthetic Seeds. Research and Reviews: Journal of Environmental Sciences, 6(3), 6–16. 

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11401084