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Post by hortusbrambonii on Oct 12, 2013 14:25:20 GMT -5
I want to experiment more with TPS next year (didn't have much results this year due to accidents with my seedling tray, waiting too long with planting, weather, weeds and other factors, but there's more things that just went completely wrong the first year and worked afterwards so I don't despair) and I was wondering about a thing.
How useful would it be to propagate potatoes not from tubers, but from cutting from the sprouts from those tubers? (Like sweet potato slips) Or even with cuttings from more developed plants from tubers?
What would the effect be? I suppose it gives a lot more, more but slightly smaller 1-stemmed plants from one single tuber. which is very intersting also if I'd have only one tuber (or when I get one tuber of a special variety from tuber-swapping)
Would it also work to get them more virus-free?
Any more ideas here? (And no, alas I do not have the material, practical knowledge, money and time for meristem-cultures and stuff like that)
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Post by billw on Oct 12, 2013 14:49:31 GMT -5
Wingnut is the man to ask. He does a lot of this and terms them "pull starts."
I can offer a bit of data about virus transmission though. I tissue culture potatoes, among other things, and usually start with a fresh sprout off the tuber. I use potato virus Y as a reference because I have a variety that is both resistant and infected, so I can keep it going. I include the known infected variety in a batch of cultures. If I no longer get a positive ELISA on the known infected plantlet at the end of treatment and culturing, then I assume that everything else in the batch is similarly clean. (Obviously, this is a gross indicator at best.)
But, the important part is this: I have never seen a sprout taken from the known infected tubers come up negative in a pre-culture test. So, I don't think you are likely to get clean lines just from slips. They may be cleaner and more vigorous as a result, but if there is virus in the tuber, it is best to assume that there is virus in the sprout.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Oct 13, 2013 8:10:44 GMT -5
Bill, What would you think of a "quick and dirty" homestead scale potato virus removal sequence involving heat treating the potatoes in an incubator of some kind followed by pull-starts? I've looked into some low-end tissue culture but have yet to take the plunge, don't really have much space in my house!
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Post by billw on Oct 13, 2013 12:06:05 GMT -5
I wish I had an answer. I intended to do some testing of heat treatment with a cheap poultry incubator over the winter but never got around to it. I've read of people getting good results, but I've never read of anyone actually testing their results. (TC is cheap but virus testing is rather expensive.) It usually takes me two or three cycles to devirus even with ribavirin in the media, so I have my doubts about getting complete cleaning with just a single round of heat treatment.
But, I really don't know. Maybe I'll find the time to try it this winter.
BTW, you don't need a huge space for tissue culture unless you want to raise large numbers of explants. My current set up is a 60 gallon aquarium turned upside down, with two holes cut for glove ports. I do all work in the aquarium, then transfer the cultures to a set of shelves with shop lights at each level, boxed in with rigid foam insulation and a small space heater at the bottom. I have some other stuff that takes up more space, but those two pieces are all that is really essential. The aquarium can be put away, so the 4'wx2'dx6'h shelf is really the only permanent space given up. Even that small setup gives me a capacity for about 160 plantlets.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Oct 13, 2013 19:58:47 GMT -5
Hmmm, I know that a basic setup isn't too involved, but my problem is my house is small with very few storage areas that are safe from my kids and some of the chemicals etc in tissue culture are a bit dangerous. I'll probably have to wait till they get a bit older before I risk it.
I'm interested because I've got a couple of potatoes that are clearly virus infected that I'd love to see what they can do when they were clean. Shetland Black is one of them. I got a lot of TPS from it this year though so I may just grow that out next year.
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Post by wingnut on Oct 18, 2013 8:55:13 GMT -5
Bill, you don't use a laminar flow hood, or any HEPA type filtration? I know it is VERY possible to keep things clean without one, I've just never tried.
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Post by billw on Oct 18, 2013 10:27:04 GMT -5
Nope. I do all my work in a glove box. I've thought about building a hood, but I can do about 20 cultures in the glove box before I need to open it and clean again and that is usually about as much as I need to do in a day anyway.
My contamination rate is about 8%, which is at least 4 times higher than you should get with a hood. But, unless I am using expensive reagents like zeatin, the cost of just including 10% overhead to make up the difference is negligible.
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Post by nathanp on Oct 20, 2013 16:41:55 GMT -5
I had one potato plant that I grew from a cutting (actually a rerooted top of another plant). The tubers all show strange lumps on them. Does this look like a disease or just weird growth? It is a Purple Peruvian Fingerling, and out of the 15 or so tubers I planted, this is the only one that produced anything like this. Here are the pics for comparison Here is what the lumpy or misshapen tubers look like Here is what the normal tubers look like on all the other plants.
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Post by nicollas on Oct 22, 2013 2:35:14 GMT -5
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Post by canadamike on Oct 25, 2013 21:58:34 GMT -5
I have grown potatoes from slips many times, I do it to get more taters, others regrow from the tubers, but they were always smaller, I always had the opposite effect. I do not think one time is conclusive at all. Even my experience is not: it was from small slips from very small tubers, far from big ones.
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