21 Jan 2022

What Do You Know About Pineapple Tissue Culture?

Anjali Singh, MS

As a content and community manager, I leverage my expertise in plant biotechnology, passion for tissue culture, and writing skills to create compelling articles, simplifying intricate scientific concepts, and address your inquiries. As a dedicated science communicator, I strive to spark curiosity and foster a love for science in my audience.

Table of Contents

Introduction to Pineapple Plant

The pineapple plant is grown worldwide for its edible, tasty fruits. Its botanical name is Ananas comosus. It’s a tropical plant that belongs to the family of Bromeliaceae. The plant is indigenous to South America and spread to European parts in the 17th century.

Pineapple is herbaceous, perennial plant, which grows up to a height of 1.0-1.5 meters and sometimes taller than that! Its stem is short and stocky with tough and waxy leaves. To create a fruit, the plant produces around 200 flowers or more than that in case the fruit is bigger in size.

All 200 flowers produce individual fruits, which come all together to create a multiple fruit/collective fruit—a fruiting body formed from a cluster of flowers. After fruits are produced, sucker or side shoots are formed in the axils of the main stem. These suckers can be removed and used to propagate more pineapple plants or left in the plants to produce more fruits.

An image of a pineapple flower cluster.

The pineapple plant has five varieties: Ananas comosus var. ananassoides, Ananas comosus var. bracteatus, Ananas comosus var. comosus, Ananas comosus var. erectifolius, and Ananas comosus var. parguazensis.

The pineapple fruit is used and consumed worldwide in varieties of forms. For example, in tropical countries, the fruits slices are sold as a roadside snack. At some other places, it’s consumed as fruit salad, pizza topping, and put as a grilled ring in hamburgers. It’s also a part of certain drinks, such as pina colada and tepache.

An image of pineapple fruit and fruit slices.

In this article, you will learn the propagation of pineapple plants through conventional and tissue culture techniques.

Propagation of Pineapple Plants

Pineapple can be grown vegetatively by using sucker, which arise in the axil of leaves on the main stem. Other than this, the crown of leaves above fruits and stem part can also be used to grow the plant. Another method to grow pineapple plants is by using slips (also a sucker), which grow just below the fruits.

Among all these vegetative methods, suckers and slips are predominantly preferred to grow pineapple plants, because they produce comparatively larger fruits.

Although the propagation of the pineapple plants using these conventional techniques is easy, it requires a lot of time and has low multiplication rates. Furthermore, suckers produced using this method are more prone to diseases, especially those that are caused by viruses. Therefore, tissue culture or micropropagation of the pineapple plants is the other best alternative.

How to Tissue Culture Pineapple?

Here’s a procedure to tissue culture pineapple plant, which is taken from the study of Atawia, Ahmed & El-Latif, F. & El-Gioushy, Sherif & Saied, Sherif & Kotb, Osama. (2016). Studies on Micropropagation of Pineapple (Ananas comosus L.). Middle East Journal of Agriculture Research ISSN 2077 - 4605.

Explant and Surface Sterilization

• Collect the crown from the mother plant.
• Remove excess foliage and wash it using water to remove dust and other dry matter.
• Wash the explant in detergent followed by washing in water for about an hour.
• Immerse the explant in a fungicide for an hour.
• Sterilize the crown with 40% Clorox [sodium hypochlorite 5.2%] for 20 min with a few drops of Tween 20.
• Rinse the explant three times using sterile distilled water.

Establish Culture Initiation

• Culture the sterilized crowns on a full-strength MS media, free from any growth regulators and supplemented with 30 g/l sucrose and 0.7% agar.
• Incubate the cultures under 25ºC ±2 under fluorescent lamps with a light intensity of 3000 lux at 16 hrs photoperiods.

Shoot Proliferation

• After a few weeks, established culture or initiated shoot were transferred to a fresh full strength MS media containing 2.0 mg/L BAP, 30 g/l sucrose, and 0.7% agar.
• Incubate the cultures under 25ºC ±2 under fluorescent lamps with a light intensity of 3000 lux at 16 hrs photoperiods.

Rooting and Acclimatization

• The regenerated shoots were excised from the old media and transferred to a fresh rooting MS media supplemented with 1.0 mg/l IAA.
• Incubated all the cultures at 25±20 ˚C under 16hours photoperiod at 30˚C and white fluorescent lamps.
• After a few weeks of regeneration of roots of plants, remove them from the media, and wash the roots with sterile water to remove any stuck media.
• Then, lant the rooted explants in pots containing sterile soil containing peat and sand at a ratio of 2:1.
• Cover the plants with a transparent polypropylene package and keep them in the greenhouse for 4 weeks of acclimatization.
• In one week, make one pore in the bag, in the second week make a couple more, at the end of the third week remove the bag, and then until the fourth week, your plant will be ready to transfer in the open field.

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So, visit plantcelltechnology.com today and find out more about our product and services and how they help you to excel in your tissue culture processes.

Happy Culturing!!