Journal of Crop Breeding

Molecular genetic techniques hold great promise to battle various plant biotic and abiotic stresses. Sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L.) is an important recalcitrant crop plants in terms of applying genetic engineering techniques, especially transformation. In an attempt to investigate and optimize sugar beet tissue culture for plant transformation, a 3´2´2 factorial experiment in a completely randomized design with 4 replicates and 10 explants each, was performed in the laboratory. The factors were three types of explants including, Lamina, petiole and shoot base buds, two types of media, namely A (Kinetin 1mgL^-1, BA 0. 5mgL^-1) and B (Kinetin 0. 5mgL^-1, BA 1mgL^-1) and two sugar beet (SBSI-04 and SBSI-02) lines. Results of analysis of variance on percentage of germination showed that the effect of type of explant, line and explant ´ line interaction were highly significant (P£0. 01). Duncan’s multiple-range test (P£0. 01), was used to compare the mean values. Result of mean analysis showed that there was no significant difference between shoot base buds of both line with that of SBSI-04 lamina. Furthermore, there was no significant (P³0. 05) difference between lamina from SBSI-04 and that of SBSI-02 line. Lamina explants from SBSI-04 showed the lowest percentage of shoot base buds production in comparison to other explants.