Recently we added to our lab a new crop – the date palm.

The technology used is somatic embryogenesis. Pieces of meristemic tissue from the shoot tip or immature inflorescences are taken from a selected adult tree of off shoot, and are planted under sterile conditions in the growth medium. The shoot tip tissue starts to divide and creates callus. When changing the medium composition, the callus changes its character and starts to form a lot of somatic embryos. After transferred from cycle to cycle, the cultures gradually develop into normal plantlets with shoots and roots until they are ready for hardening outside the lab in the hardening facility.

The propagation of the date palm by tissue culture technology is a very slow process. The duration in the lab takes about 3 years ! From hardening facility the plants are transferred to the nursery  and are transferred a few times  to bigger containers until they reach the desired size and are ready for delivery to the customers to be planted in the field. Hardening and growth stages in the nursery takes about 1.5 - 2 years, thus the entire process takes about 5 years!

Advantages of date palm tissue culture plants:

• Known and selected origin
• Health
• Uniformity
• Plan the planting
• Complete survival
• Early fruiting
• High quality crop

For more information please see https://www.zvieli.co.il/