IN VITRO MULTIPLICATION OF ARTICHOKE AND VIRUS ELIMINATION BY TERMOTHERAPY AND CHEMOTHERAPY

The artichoke is normally propagated by vegetative means; this explains why it has many problems due to the transmission of pathogens which are easily spread with the material used for reproduction. Viruses represent the main sanitary problem for artichoke. “In vitro” tissue culture of artichoke can be considered as a valid alternative to the usual systems of propagation; it is the key to rapid material propagation, health indexing and genetic uniformity. The market offers a sort of resistance to accept new artichoke varieties and this is one of the reasons why it is important to focus attempts in order to obtain and maintain the traditional accepted and well-known varieties virus-free, especially the ones which run the risk of extinction. In this work we describe the state of the art on artichoke tissue culture and its technical advantages; micropropagated artichokes have been spreading in the nursery market for about 15 years and nowadays they represent a well established reality accepted by the farmers. We will also describe the laboratory experiments aimed to obtain virus-free artichoke tissue cultures. We succeeded in setting up efficient protocols for virus elimination from artichoke by testing different doses of chemotherapic agents, against both DNA and RNA viruses, in micropropagated shoots together with thermotherapy treatments and meristem cultures, and subsequently by checking the shoots onto herbaceous indexes. In vitro tissue culture together with viruses decontamination are indeed powerful tools to obtain a nursery product of undoubted quality.