micropropagation of banana

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Introduction

Bananas are widely grown in Malaysia as it is highly in demand, it is ranked as the second largest fruit crops produced in Malaysia. Bananas are healthy to be consumed as it contains high vitamins and minerals (Ware, 2014). However, banana production in our country has decreased due to several factors such as the threat of various diseases, high cost of production and lack of diverse planting materials. Jong (2012) mentioned that around 50 % of the banana plantation in Malaysia is cultivated mainly for export, such as Pisang Cavendish.
The conventional way of banana planting are growing the bananas from their vegetative suckers. Nevertheless, this is not considered as an ideal method in banana production as the planting materials may carry viruses and fungal pathogen (Jong, 2012). Therefore, tissue culture is the alternative to the conventional method for banana production. Tissue culture method benefits the production of bananas by producing plants that are free of diseases, faster growth rates, greater yield and safe for human consumption (Increasing banana yields by using tissue culture method, n.d.). According to Tissue Culture (n.d.), the main purpose of tissue culture is to produce healthy plantlets that are free of virus diseases with high yields.
Micropropagation is one of the plant tissue culture techniques which is commonly used in producing banana tissue cultures. Micropropagation is defined as the production of whole plants from cell cultures derived from explants, according to Biotechnology: Tissue Culture (n.d.). It can be further divided into shoot culture, organogenesis and somatic embryogenesis. Shoot-tip culture is the most commonly used method for commercial micropropagation. It has the main advan...

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....). The crop productions of tissue culture bananas are uniformed and can be supplied at any time all year round which is season independent. Conventional farming is depended on the weather and seasons. Besides that, conventional farming is not uniformed as some of the banana plants ripen faster than others therefore resulting an increase in cost of production (Tissue Culture, n.d.). The transportation of tissue culture bananas are also cheaper and easier compared to conventional farming.
Although the bananas produced from micropropagation have many advantages over the conventional method, tissue culture is considered as an expensive method with high production cost. Therefore, it is important to develop a low-cost micropropagation technique in order to make it affordable to the buyers, especially the farmers without compromising the quality of the plants produced.

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