In-vitro Culture of Garcinia indica Choisy: A review

Abstract

Garcinia indica Choisy, an endemic plant to Western Ghats of India, belongs to the family Clusiaceae and is popularly known as Kokum (Shetty and Kaveriappa 2001, Naithani et al., 1997). It is a dioecious tree flowers in November-February and fruits ripen in the April-June (Anonymous 1956, Sawantetal., 1999). The conventional way of propagation of Kokum is by seeds. These natural seedling populations, due to cross pollination and heterozygous nature of the trees, has abundant variation with respect to growth, habit, flowering and fruiting season, fruit yield and morphological and biochemical characteristics of fruits (Korikanthimath and Desai 2005). Also, the early ripening and high yielding genotypes are preferred, because harvesting and processing of fruits need to be completed before the onset of monsoon (end of April or beginning of June) in the Western India (Chabukswar and Deodhar, 2005). To overcome the above problems, the production of high yielding elite clones is necessary. In-vitro culture studies have been carried out by various scientific groups and they have developed and standardized the protocol for mass multiplication of Kokum plants through embryogenesis and multiple shoot formation. This review summarizes all the tissue culture work carried out till date on Kokum.