Mass Propagation of Selected Trees for Biomass by Tissue Culture

Abstract

The enormous potential of trees as future sources of biomass yield has been envisaged as early as 1935 by Professor Bergius (Gleisinger 1942). Biomass resources, a source of energy, are conversions of solar energy deposited by photosynthesis in woody plants as large quantities of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. Biomass resources which exist in forests, have been relatively unexploited both in the U.S.A. and in the world. The commercial implications of this immense reproductive biomass power is limited to a large extent by the absence of application of modern integrated technological developments. One method to obtain additional energy is to increase the yield of biomass by genetic improvement and then the mass propagation of the genetically improved strains. It is now possible through tissue culture techniques to produce “test tube trees”, i.e., plants obtained from only a few cells of a tree by manipulations under laboratory conditions. Thus several thousand young plantlets can be produced from a single tree and these can be transferred to the field and grown as seedlings within a short time. It is also possible to use protoplast isolation, culture, fusion of protoplasts and genetic manipulations to obtain new “hybrid” trees in plants that normally do not cross to produce superior genotypes.

Supported by The BioEnergy Council, Washington, D.C., Energy Laboratory, University of Houston and the University of Houston Coastal Center.