MASS-PROPAGATION AND BIOREACTOR-BASED TECHNOLOGIES FOR GERMPLASM CONSERVATION, EVALUATION AND INTERNATIONAL DISTRIBUTION OF BREADFRUIT

It has become increasingly important to facilitate re-distribution and access to breadfruit cultivars that have been selected over millennia by the indigenous peoples of the Pacific region but may have been lost from many local communities. The collection of breadfruit cultivars at the Breadfruit Institute of the National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG) provides an important germplasm resource, but redistribution from the site has been hampered by: 1) the relatively few number of trees for each individual cultivar; 2) the limited number of roots available to provide root cuttings or root shoots from each tree; 3) international plant quarantine requirements that limit the distribution of root cuttings; and 4) the low success rate for establishing trees from mature roots. Over the last three years, an efficient micropropagation and plant production strategy was developed for in vitro clonal propagation, regeneration, large-scale bioreactor production and acclimatization of mass-propagated breadfruit plantlets into tropical environments.