Potato Virus Elimination Techniques
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Potatoes are nutritious and store well. They have a short growth period and great yield-increasing potential, and are popular among people. However, potatoes are susceptible to infection by various viruses, which leads to smaller and deformed tubers, seed potato degeneration, and so on. Experiments have proven that using shoot-tip tissue culture combined with virus testing to eliminate viruses from potatoes, and then producing virus-free seed potatoes for production, can effectively prevent seed potato degeneration and greatly increase potato yields. Themain virus elimination methods are as follows:
1. Material collection and disinfection: Sprout the tubers of the variety to be virus-eliminated. When the sprouts are 4-5 cm long, cut the sprouts and remove the outer leaves, rinse under running water for 40 min, disinfect in a sterile room with bleaching powder solution, then rinse 2-3 times with sterile water.
2. Excision and inoculation: In a sterile room, under a 40x dissecting microscope, excise the shoot tip with 1 leaf primordium and inoculate it into a test tube containing MS shoot-tip culture medium. The MS shoot-tip culture medium in the test tube includes macronutrients, micronutrients, organic components, auxin, cytokinin, sucrose and agar, with a pH value of 5.7. It is used after high-pressure sterilization, and 1 shoot tip is inoculated per test tube.
3. Culture conditions: The inoculated shoot tips are cultured in a culture room at 25C under 1500-3000LX light conditions, and grow into small plantlets with 3-4 leaves in 3 months. Under sterile conditions, cut into segments and propagate once, and take some plantlets for virus testing.
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4. Virus testing: Virus testing is an indispensable step in shoot-tip virus elimination. Commonly used methods include differential hosts, namely indicator plants, or serological methods for testing, promptly eliminating shoot-tip plantlets that show positive serological reactions or symptoms on indicator plants. Shoot-tip plantlets with no reaction at all are virus-free plantlets and are used for propagation.