THE BENEFITS OF A POLLEN CULTURE

With growing demands of an ever increasing population of the world, there is a need to increase the type and quality of food production by understanding the techniques and principles of breeding of plants to attain better yields.

One conventional method of doing so is by resorting to sexual hybridization. This essentially involves transporting pollen from one plant to another in order to obtain hybrids, which are generally of a better quality. Hybridization is done keeping the characteristics of the parent plants as well as the desired product in mind.

What is Pollen?

If you observe the structure of a flower, it contains of the Sepals, the Petals, the Stamen and the Pistols. A flower is the prime carrier of reproductory organs of a plant and these are the Pistols and the Stamen which carry male and female parts of a plant. Pollen is the fine or coarse powder that contains microgametophytes of the seed plants that produce male gametes (sperm cells).

Action of Pollen

Pollen grains bear a hard coat which protects the sperm cells during process of their movement from the stamens to the pistil of flowering plants.
After the pollen reaches a compatible pistil of the similar flowering plant, it germinates, that is - it transfers the sperm to the receptive ovary through a pollen tube.


Pollination



(a) Self Pollination - In case the anthers of a plant are taller than its stigma, it leads to the plant being able to pollinate itself by allowing its own pollen to drift towards and into its own stigma, which is essentially a tube protecting the ovum, i.e. the female DNA part of the plant. After the pollen reaches its ovum, it fertilizes and forms the fruit or a nut.

(b) Cross pollination – This happens when the pollen gets carried to another flower or plant by the action of wind, birds, insects, or animals carry pollen from one flower to another. Wind-borne pollen also causes conditions like hay fever and allergies amongst some of us...


What is Pollen Culture?


The action of wind or other carriers like bees, animals, insects, etc is not specific and cannot be controlled. In order to get the fertilization to take place between the best varieties of trees and produce best quality hybrid seeds, it is essential to have control on how the fertilization takes place.

For this purpose Pollen Culture is resorted to. In this, the isolated pollen grains are cultured in vitro, under controlled conditions and give rise to haploid embryos; such an approach is also called pollen culture.

Pollen may be isolated either by squeezing or float culturing the anthers.
In crops that are cross-pollinated: the parent that furnishes the pollen which pollinates the stigma of the other parent in the production of seed is called the pollinator.


Procedure of pollination culture

Initially isolated pollen grains are cultured in laboratories either by method of hanging drops or by using a filter paper positioned on the cultured anthers. Subsequently, these anthers continue to spill pollen and their serial subculture finally yields pollen samplings in diverse stages of andragenesis (haploid embryo/plantlet formation from pollen grains). The cross pollination is then carried out in vitriol, i.e. in the laboratory under controlled conditions and by carefully selecting the pollinators.

Advantages of Pollen Culture


Pollen culture has many advantages. Some of these are


 Higher and better yields of hybrid variety of plants.
 Robust, disease free plants
 Higher Resilience of plants to diseases and pests
 Better aesthetics and variety
 Lesser dependence on Chemical based fertilizers and enzymes.
 Economic and cost effective production
 Better shelf life with natural resistance to various degrading vectors

The pollen culture reported from several species proves to be very as well as successful., Cross pollinated hybrids raised from pollen culture have proved to be very productive in case of many species of plants like tobacco, Datura, barley, wheat, petunia, potato, rice, rapeseed, maize, etc.