Abstract

Bamboos are versatile, arborescent, perennial and non-wood forest trees with tremendous eco-sociological and commercial importance. Different propagation techniques are available for bamboo, such as seed propagation, clump division, rhizome and culm cuttings, but these classical techniques suffer from serious drawbacks for large or mass scale propagation. For mass scale propagation, these are largely insufficient and inefficient and micropropagation is the only viable method. Indeed, the order of magnitude of the demand for bamboo planting material indicates that micropropagation will inevitably be necessary for mass scale propagation. The potential of micropropagation for mass scale propagation of bamboo has raised high hopes and a lot of research has been focused on the development of protocols for large and rapid scale propagation. These encompass optimization and establishment of in vitro culture techniques including micropropagation, somatic embryogenesis, in vitro flowering, macro proliferation, field performance and clonal fidelity. This review briefly provides the state-of-the-art information on tissue culture mediated biotechnological interventions made in bamboo for large scale micropropagation, that being the need of the hour.

Key words: Bamboo, micropropagation, somatic embryogenesis, in vitro flowering, macroproliferation, field performance, clonal fidelity.