I International Symposium on Vegetative Propagation and In Vitro Culture of Tropical Plants

The great progress produced in the last century by the genetic improvement of plants would have been of little significance without the contemporary amelioration of the vegetative propagation technology. The use of portions of shoots to reproduce plants was already known in the early horticulture of Egypt, Babylon and China, while evidences of the “budding and grafting art” are frequent in writings and mosaics from the Roman Empire. With the important advancements in methods and equipments made in the twentieth century, coupled to a better understanding of physiological and morphological events driving the processes of adventitious root formation, graft healing and in vitro shoot proliferation, a range of effective techniques are available today for the in vivo and in vitro clonal reproduction of plants. Moreover, increasingly sophisticated methods of tissue culture paved the way to the development of useful approaches for the production and conservation of high-quality pathogen-free plants. Notwithstanding, many unsolved issues are still relevant, such as the “recalcitrancy” of many species to be clonally reproduced. The Symposium, the first of the series, aims to bring together scientists and students, as well as managers and technicians from commercial nurseries and micropropagation laboratories, around the problematics and recent acquisitions in the field of vegetative propagation and in vitro culture of tropical and sub-tropical plant species.