[MEDIA] 7 th SLOVENIAN SYMPOSIUM ON PLANT BIOLOGY with...

7 th SLOVENIAN SYMPOSIUM ON PLANT BIOLOGY with international participation Biotechnical Faculty, University of Ljubljana September 17 - 18, 2018, Ljubljana, Slovenia


Micropropagation of medical cannabis (Cannabis sativa L.)

Špela Mestinšek Mubi* 1 , Marko Flajšman1 , Borut Bohanec1 , Jana Murovec1 1University of Ljubljana, Biotechnical Faculty, Department of Agronomy, Slovenia *corresponding author ([email protected])

Plant tissue culture is an essential component of plant biotechnology. Since there are only a few reports about tissue culture of Cannabis sativa L. (Chaohua et al., 2016; Feeney and Punja, 2003; Lata et al., 2016), the development of an efficient micropropagation procedure may be of high commercial value for the medical cannabis industry. The study was performed as part of MGC Pharmaceuticals project “Breeding medical cannabis (Cannabis sativa L.)” in collaboration with the Biotechnical Faculty of the University of Ljubljana. Four experiments were done on their breeding lines MX-CBD-11 and MX-CBD-707 as follows: In the first experiment, sterilized nodes were inoculated on three different culture media. The results showed that 30 days after inoculation, in the breeding line MX-CBD-11 the basal MS medium supplemented with meta-topolin induced the higher number of axillary shoots and the longest shoots, while in the breeding line MX-CBD-707 the higher number of axillary shoots were induced on MS basal medium without hormones. The longest shoots were formed on the MS basal medium supplemented with meta-topolin. In the second experiment, we studied the effect of node position on initiation of shoot cultures. Nodes from five positions were inoculated on MS basal medium without hormones. For both breeding lines, nodes closer to the apical meristem produced less axillary shoots than those from distal ones. The results of the third experiment showed that the average number of shoots per node is increasing through the time for both breeding lines. The fourth experiment aimed to evaluate the effect of 10 different culture media, composed of basal MS medium supplemented with BAP and IAA at various concentrations, on in vitro culture initiation. The breeding line MX-CBD-11 produced a higher number and longer axillary shoots than the breeding line MX-CBD-707 on all tested media. With these experiments, we showed that different culture media are appropriate for growing in vitro culture of medical cannabis. Besides, shoot culture establishment is significantly influenced by genotype and nodal position.