Transgenic Dendrobium (Orchid)
Worldwide production of orchids, both as cut flowers and pot plants, is rapidly on the rise as consumer demands increase. Orchid export industries have emerged worldwide and grown significantly in recent years from Thailand, the world’s largest exporter o
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1 Introduction Worldwide production of orchids, both as cut flowers and pot plants, is rapidly on the rise as consumer demands increase. Orchid export industries have emerged worldwide and grown significantly in recent years from Thailand, the world 's largest exporter of tropical orchids, to European countries such as The Netherlands and Germany, both with a sizeable orchid export industry. The Dendrobium genus is one of the most important orchids for the cut-flower trade in terms of export volume. It has a number of important characteristics like free flowering and a long vase life of 2 to 3 weeks, making it ideally suited for the cut-flower trade. Because of the extensive efforts carried out by breeders over the past 30 years, coupled with the development of efficient tissue culture techniques (Arditti and Krikorian 1996), the availability in terms of varieties and quantity of plant material has made it possible for extensive cultivation of Dendrobium in Southeast Asian (SEA) countries. Currently, Thailand is the world's largest producer of Dendrobium flowers, accounting for more than 80% of the world's Dendrobium production, estimated to be over US $100 million (Hew 1994). In light of the fact that the Dendrobium genera make such an economic contribution to the export revenue of many of the SEA countries, major efforts were undertaken by the commercial as well as the government agencies to continue the breeding for plants with desirable traits. Traditional breeding of orchids is an extremely slow and time-consuming affair due to the long breeding cycle. Dendrobium orchids take at least 2 to 4 years before they mature. This is further limited by the fact that this genus has a small and limited gene pool. In order to maintain the high quality of orchids and to carve out a bigger share of the market, there is a need to stay ahead with technology and to strive to create better orchid varieties. With the advent of technology in the past 20 years, other techniques have been attempted to overcome the long breeding cycle as well as to expand the genetic diversity. These include the use of protoplast culture, embryo rescue, mutagenesis through radiation and chemicals, and in vitro flowering. However,
Biology Division, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, 469 Bukit Timah Road , Singapore 259756 Biotechnology in Agriculture and Forestry, Vol. 48 Transgenic Crops III (ed. by y.P.S. Bajaj) © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 20(H
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T.-F. Chia et al.
many of these attempts were aborted due to constant failures and poor results. In the late 1980s, with the advent of molecular biology and genetic manipulation techniques, genetic transformation of plants for specific traits raised the potential of molecular breeding of orchids. Molecular approaches have allowed researchers to alter individual desired traits in agronomic and ornamental crops through the availability of the genes encoding the desired traits and the ease of transformation and regeneration of the transgenic target crops.
2 Genet
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