By any standard, farmers have always had a particularly hard row to hoe, ever subject to the vicissitudes of weather and the myriad other blows - insects, blights, scavengers, pathogens that nature regularly aims at their efforts to coax their crops to maturity. To make their lot a little easier, agricultural researchers in Crete are using cell cultures to create hardy plants that have a better chance of surviving and producing healthy harvests.
Home-grown in the lab
"One of our major goals is to reduce our imports of seeds from abroad," TEI Professor Garoufalia Grammatikaki-Avgeli, one of the researchers involved in the project, told daily Ta Nea. At present, Greece is lacking in nurseries to provide farmers with the raw materials for sowing their fields. As a result, growers must rely on imported material, which may be diseased, of doubtful quality or hard to adapt to local conditions. (Recently, for example, infected potatoes planted in Crete's Lasithi Plain resulted in the placing of the islands entire potato crop under quarantine).
It must be noted that the plants propagated by the researchers do not undergo genetic modification. The on-going scientific work is being conducted in Iraklio, Crete, by researchers of the Technical Educational Institute and the Plant Protection Institute of the National Agricultural Research Foundation (N.AG.RE.F.), in association with the Agricultural University of Athens, the International Research Centre in Rome and other Italian research groups.
Thus far, in-vitro propagation efforts have focussed on the production of grapevines, banana plants and potatoes. The plan to create test-tube grapevines was set in motion following an initiative by growers on the Cycladic island of Paros who set up vineyard nurseries as a source of seedlings. Using Paros grapevine stock, brought to Crete seven years ago by a researcher from the National Agricultural Research Foundation, the researchers created cell cultures from which disease-free, resistant and robust seedlings developed.
Paros growers have since acquired thousands of these plants, which they in turn use to set up nurseries that will ensure a steady supply of seedlings for the country's growers.
Going bananas
According to Prof. Avgeli, banana producers today face serious problems due to infected or weak stock. But help is on the way; the country's first batch of about 2,500 to 3,000 test-tube baby banana plants will be distributed to Crete's banana growers this coming August, to be used for the cultivation of bananas for the organic fruit market. To ensure that the new crop would start off disease-free, the parental stocks used to develop the seedlings were subjected to high temperatures (37 degrees C) so as to be fully sterilized before researchers extract cells for propagation.
Of course, none of this is free. Producers will have to put their hand in their pockets, said Prof. Avgeli, if they want to ensure the abundance and quality of their products.
