Anther Culture of Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.)

Abstract

Doubled haploid technology allows for producing completely homozygous plants in one generation, which is a very efficient and fast method compared to the production of near-homozygous lines by selfing through conventional breeding methods. However, grain legumes are known to be recalcitrant for most of the in vitro approaches to doubled haploidy. In the last years, significant advances have been made with several legume species through in vitro methods. Chickpea is one of the most important legume species. Several reports have documented the successful generation of haploid plants through anther culture. These reports also showed that successful production of chickpea haploids was achieved when time- and labor-consuming physical stresses such as centrifugation and electroporation were applied to anthers as a pretreatment. In this chapter, we present an efficient and simple anther culture protocol for production of chickpea haploid plants using high concentrations of 2,4-D and silver nitrate in the culture medium, but without applying any physical stresses to anthers.

Keywords: 2,4-D; Anther culture; Chickpea; Haploids; Silver nitrate.