Publications - Faculty - Recently Submitted Faculty Publications 2008
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Grosser - Methods Express
Protoplast fusion technology – somatic hybridization and cybridization
Jude W. Grosser, Milica Ćalović and Eliezer S. Louzada
Introduction: Plant somatic hybridization via protoplast fusion has become an important tool in plant improvement, allowing researchers to combine somatic cells (whole or partial) from different cultivars, species, or genera, resulting in novel genetic combinations including symmetric allotetraploid somatic hybrids, asymmetric somatic hybrids, or somatic cybrids. This technique can facilitate breeding and gene transfer by bypassing problems sometimes associated with conventional sexual crossing including sexual incompatibility, polyembryony, and male or female sterility. The pioneer of plant protoplasts, Edward C. Cocking, got the ball rolling with his landmark paper on plant protoplast isolation published in Nature [1]. Since the first successful report on somatic hybridization with tobacco in 1972 [2], hundreds of reports have been published during the past three decades which extend the procedures to additional plant genera and evaluate the utilization potential of somatic hybrids in many crops including rice, rapeseed, tomato, potato, and citrus, etc. Some key papers published during the evolution of this technology include: Bravo and Evans [3], Davey and Kumar [4], Dudits et al. [5], Fowke and Gamborg [6], Kao et al. [7], Kumar and Cocking [8], Melchers et al. [9], Saito et al. [10], Schieder and Vasil [11], Shepard et al. [12], Waara and Glimelius [13]. Plant somatic hybridization has been reviewed several times in general [3, 13-15], and specifically for citrus [16, 17] and potato [18]. Key reviews are also available that focus on somatic cybridization and organelle inheritance [8, 19], with the latter reference also featuring current methodologies for molecular characterization of somatic hybrid and cybrid plants.
