Tissue culture propagation of Mongolian cherry (Prunus fruticosa L.) and Nanking cherry (Prunus Tomentosa L.)

Micropropagation has been successfully used for production of other fruitbearing, native prairie shrubs such as Amelanchier alnifolia Nutt., the Saskatoon berry (Pruski et al., 1990, 1991), Prunus pensylvanica L., the pincherry (Pruski et al., 2000), and P. virginiana, the chokecherry (Pruski et al., 2000; Zhang et al., 2000). Recently, successful micropropagation methods for P. fruticosa L. and P. tomentosa L. have also been reported (Ping et al., 2001; Pruski et al., 2005). Tissue culture protocols have been developed for propagation of several other species of Prunus including P. cerasus L. (Boxus & Quoirin, 1977; Borkowska, 1985), P. tenella (Alderson et al., 1987), P. insititia L. (Loreti et al., 1988), P. avium L. Hammatt & Grant, 1996), P. armeniaca (Murai & Harada, 1997), ‘Hally Jolivette’ cherry (Lineberger, 1983), several cherry rootstocks, including P. cerasifera × P. munsoniana (Dalzotto & Docampo, 1997), P. persica × P. amygdalus peach rootstock (Marino & Ventura, 1997) and Prunus spp. (rootstocks: MrS 2/5, Ferdor Julior and San Julia Hybrid N-01) (Radice et al., 1999). There is very limited information on work on tissue culture propagation of Mongolian cherry and Nanking cherry. Most of the work on these two cherry species has been done on micropropagation, and there is no information available on embryo, fruit, anther, or callus culture. Although tissue culture propagation has been used for a number of cherry species for over 20 years, the summary below is the first compilation of the experimental protocols for micropropagation of P. fruticosa and P. tomentosa.