ENERGY SOURCES AFFECT IN VITRO PROPAGATION AND SUBSEQUENT ACCLIMATIZATION OF ANANAS COMOSUS, VAR. SMOOTH CAYENNE PLANTS

Plant tissue culture is an inevitable technique to overcome healthy and limited planting materials problems using suitable energy sources. Different carbohydrates have diverse effect on in vitro growing plantlets in terms of growth performance, acclimatization and cost used for micro-propagation. Hence, this paper reports the effects of sucrose, fructose, glucose, table sugar and starch on pineapple in vitro mass propagation and acclimatization as well as the analysis of energy source required cost per a medium. A complete randomized design was used to compare analytic grade sucrose with other four energy sources at 2 and 3 % (w/v). The results revealed that the energy sources with varied concentration strongly influenced the in vitro growth and subsequent acclimatization of pineapple plantlets. Analytic grade sucrose and table sugar at 3 % performed well for in vitro survival rate (100%), shoot amplification (15.3-16.5 shoots), rooting ability (2.5cm long and 12 roots) and acclimatization (95.4-97%). However, fructose and glucose required high importation cost (229.1% and 121.9% over analytic grade sucrose, respectively), and have low growth and acclimatization performance next to starch and energy free medium. Thus, table sugar has found to be a suitable alternative energy source for pineapple mass propagation, which saved about 95-97% cost from that of laboratory grade sucrose.