Plant regeneration from apple (Malus×domestica Borkh.) anther culture-derived embryos

Abstract To improve the adaptation process of the obtained androgenic plants and achieve high acquisition efficiency of plants in anther culture, six cultivars, ‘ASP’, ‘Danxian’, ‘Fuji’, ‘Gala’, ‘SD’, and ‘Senshu’, were used to investigate the effect of sucrose concentration on root formation from embryos in the cold treatment and the effect of plant regulators in the shoot regeneration medium for rooted and nonrooted embryos. The results indicated that cold treatment medium containing 1.5% sucrose showed the highest root formation in the three cultivars ‘ASP’, ‘Senshu’ and ‘SD’. The rooted embryos readily developed into shoots compared to the nonrooted embryos. For rooted embryos, the preferred medium for shoot regeneration was 1/2 MS hormone-free medium containing 1.5% sucrose, whereas the preferred medium for nonrooted embryos was MS or 1/2 MS medium containing BAP and 3% sucrose. The genotype also played an important role in the process of plant regeneration from anther culture-derived embryos in apple. The cultivars ‘ASP’ (14.4%), ‘SD’ (6.2%) and ‘Danxian’ (6.0%) showed the highest rates of embryo induction. The cultivars ‘Danxian’, ‘Gala’, and ‘Senshu’ showed the highest rates of regeneration from embryos to shoots of 33.7%, 26.9% and 21.55%, respectively. Consequently, the total efficiency from anthers to shoots of ‘Danxia’ was 2.33%, followed by ‘Gala’, ‘Fuji’, ‘Senshu’, ‘SD’ and ‘ASP’, which had efficiencies of 0.35%, 0.30%, 0.30%, 0.27% and 0.25%, respectively.