Comparing nursery behavior, field plant yield and fruit quality of in vitro and in vivo propagated strawberry mother plants

In different countries, mostly in EU, rules for strawberry nursery propagation impose the use of micropropagation only to produce stock virus free plant followed by at least three nursery production cycles in the field before selling these plants to growers. This limit has been imposed by problems concerning true-to-type plants observed in micro-propagated plants of some cultivars, with higher genotypic and phenotypic instability, and the incorrect use of higher concentrations of cytokinin in the proliferation phase. This production system of certified plants has high economic and environmental costs without a final guarantee on the sanitary state of the plants. New knowledges on in vitro techniques and new cultivars with higher genetic stability can offer the opportunity to improve the use of micropropagation in strawberry nursery industry. With the aim to propose a new protocol for strawberry propagation, an experimental trial was set up to compare the behavior of frigo and micro-mother plants of cv. Alba, a well know commercial cultivar in EU, in two cycles of nursery runner production and the yield, to verify in two successive cycles the fruit quality of daughter plants grown in open field conditions. The results confirmed the equivalence of the two types of mother plants both in plant nursery production and subsequently in field fruit production. Therefore, the direct use of micro-mother plants for nursery productions of frigo-plants for growers offer an alternative option for large scale frigo-plant nursery production.