The Effect of Gelling agent, medium pH and silver nitrate on adventitious shoot regeneration in Solanum tuberosum

Vegetative propagation of potato makes the crop vulnerable to many seed borne diseases. The importance of the crop in attainment of food security makes it an important candidate for in vitro propagation and genetic manipulations. To undertake crop improvement programmes, development of an efficient regeneration protocol is a pre-requisite. Therefore, the present report was focussed to study various factors affecting shoot organogenesis in potato cultivar Kufri Chipsona 1. The incorporation of silver nitrate (10 {micro}M) to the regeneration medium (MS medium supplemented with BA and GA3) was found to induce shoot organogenesis in 32.11% of leaf and 59.99% of internodal explants. An increase in mean number of shoots regenerated per leaf (5.31) and internodal (8.67) explant was also observed upon addition of silver nitrate to the medium. Similarly, solidification of medium with clarigel and its adjustment to pH 5.8 was found optimum for increasing shoot organogenesis frequency in potato. Among the two types of explants tested, a better response was observed from internodes in comparison with leaf explants. The regenerated shoots were tested for clonal fidelity using PCR based molecular markers [Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) and Inter-Simple Sequence Repeats (ISSR)] and were found true to type.