The Role of Biotechnology on Coffee Plant Propagation: A Current topics paper

Abstract

This review paper was aimed to assess the significance of biotechnology on coffee propagation. In this paper, biotechnological coffee propagation methods such as in vitro techniques (somatic embryogenesis, direct organogenesis, androgenesis and protoplast culture), genetic transformation, molecular marker techniques and germplasm conservation are reviewed. This paper revealed that  explosion of plant biotechnology has led to many advances in the field of coffee quality improvement including breeding and cultivar development since conventional coffee breeding involving selection from wild populations followed by hybridization and progeny evaluation, backcrossing, and interspecific crossing, takes more than 30 years to obtain a new cultivar. Many studies showed that micro propagation of coffee is highly desirable as it can reduce the time it takes to establish high-valued coffee plantations. In most of the studies, it is presented that development of marker-assisted selection provides an alternative to overcome the limitations of conventional coffee breeding.