AYA and HANA: New Seedless Mandarin’s Triploid Hybrids Selected in Morocco

Seedlessness is a major objective in Morocco Citrus improvement programmes. Triploidy has played an important role in the development of new seedless mandarin cultivars for fresh fruit market and has received increasing attention for the consumers. For that, many series of diploid crosses were assessed. At maturity, the fruits have been harvested, and small embryos were extracted from undeveloped seed and cultured on the medium of Murashig and Skoog supplemented with 1mg/l gibberellic acid according. Triploids seedling selected by flow cytometry analysis were budded on Troyer citrange and planted in INRA domain with spacing 6 m X 3 m. Tow new seedless selections of mandarins have been evaluated in a citrus breeding program at Morocco INRA: Hana and Aya that were compared with their female parent clementine Sidi Aissa. These promising seedless mandarins were identified by easy-peeling, juicy fruits, have a pleasant taste and are sweet like the Sidi Aissa Clementine. These clones, showing commercial interest, were described and registered in Moroccan official catalogue.

Plantlet Regeneration from Unfertilized Ovule of Mandarin (Citrus reticulata)

The genus Citrus contains numerous fresh and processed fruit cultivars that are economically important worldwide, many genotypes are amenable to somatic embryogenesis, which became a key regeneration pathway in many experimental approaches of cultivar improvement. in this objective We aime at studying the effects of various culture media on the induction and the development of citrus somatic embryos.Callus cultures were initiated from the infertlized ovules of six varieties of mandarin (Anana, Lee, Murcott, Ortanique, Temple, and Wilking) within 3 media: MT (Murashig and Tuker, 1969) without hormones, MT + 1 mg/l BAP, MT + 1 mg/l Kinetin, the experiments show a highly significant effect (P < 0.001) of the culture media and genotype. No reactivity was observed on the MT environment in the absence of growth regulator, while the culture media MT in addition to 1 mg/l BAP gave the best results of induction of embryogenic callus induction. The induction of somatic embryogenesis was obtained on MT media without hormones. For the plantlets regeneration the favorable media was MT without hormones or added to ANA and active coal.