Anther Culture in Jatropha curcas L.: A Tree Species

The obstacles to breeding programs in Jatropha are the long reproductive cycle with a juvenile phase that lasts several months, the highly heterozygous nature of the genome, the large canopy size, and self-incompatibility that is a long-term process which requires multiple cycles of self-pollination to achieve complete homozygosity. In vitro plant tissue culture-based tools such as haploids and doubled haploid techniques can increase the selection efficiency, resulting into selection of superior plants with complete homozygosity in one generation. It bypasses the complications of greenhouse field evaluation or off-season generation advancement, which takes about 8-10 generations in traditional breeding with the time line of 10-12 years. The haploids have in fact a single set of chromosomes, which undergoes duplication spontaneously during in vitro culture conditions, and are further converted into doubled haploid plants. This represents a major biotechnological tool to accelerate plant breeding. Here, we have established a reproducible, unique anther culture protocol in Jatropha curcas to develop haploid and doubled haploid plants.