Author(s): Dereje Shimelis, Kassahun Bantte and Tilaye Feyissa
Sugarcane isgrown in Ethiopia as both cash and industrial crop. Although it plays a great role in the economy of the country, there are no enough sugarcane varieties under production and it is not an ideal crop for conventional breeding. Hence, it takes around ten years for its breeding and extra years to scale up the planting material for commercial by vegetative propagation. To circumvent these limitations, biotechnological tool (Plant tissue culture) was born as best alternative. Though the tissue culture (micro propagation) plays a reliable role, culture establishment stage of sugarcane micro propagation has a serious phenolic oxidation problem which can kill the whole culture. Hence, these experiments were conducted to optimize the appropriate concentration of Polyvinylpyrrolidone (0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5 gL-1) and Activated charcoal (0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5 gL-1) on (C86-12, C86-56) genotypes in completely randomized design with 2 × 5 factorial treatment combinations arrangements to control the effect of phenolic oxidation. Analysis of variance showed that interaction effect of Polyvinylpyrrolidone and genotypes. Activated charcoal and genotypes on percentage of survived and dead explants due to phenolic oxidation were highly significant at (P=0.001). Murashige and Skoog medium supplemented with 0.2 gL-1 and 0.3 gL-1 of Polyvinylpyrrolidone has gave 100% and 80% survived explants of C86-56 and C86-12genotypes respectively while 0.4 gL-1 and 0.3 gLl-1of activated charcoal resulted in 46% and 40% of survived explants of C86-56 and C86-12 genotypes respectively, after 30 days of culturing. Thus, these optimized concentrations of Polyvinylpyrrolidone and activated charcoal are useful to control the effect of phenolic oxidation on culture establishment of micro propagation, which helps to have enough starter culture for further multiplication stage of micro propagation.
