Germination and In Vitro regeneration response of local Nigerian tomato cultivar using different explant sources

In vitro regeneration of plants is an important tool in both basic and applied studies as well as commercial applications. It can be of use in overcoming the constraints of tomato production. Assessment of seed sterilization procedures and in vitro regeneration of tomato cultivar was attempted using different explant sources. Seed sterilization procedures with and without ethanol treatment and varying duration of application were used while explants were cultured on Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium only and MS media with varying concentrations of cytokinins and fixed concentration of auxin as Regeneration media (RM). Seeds sterilized with 10% (v/v) solution of sodium hypochlorite for 10 min with two to three drops of non-ionic surfactant (Tween 20) added without ethanol treatment and repeated for 5 min gave the highest germination percentage of 57.33% and percentage contamination of 11.11% compared to seeds sterilized with other disinfection procedures. MS media supplemented with 2 mg/l Kinetin and 0.1 mg/l NAA produced average shoot initiation values of 1.71, 1.57 and 1.57 and average root initiation values of 0.57, 0.00 and 2.85 for cotyledon, hypocotyl and leaf explants respectively. The study showed that the tomato cultivar could be amenable for crop improvement and micro propagation purposes.Key words: Seed sterilization, In vitro regeneration, explant, cultivar, organogenesis