Biotecnologie

Abstract

Recently, in industrialized and emerging countries a pressing demand has increased from consumers for more diversified and healthy products. In addition, it is increasing the sensitivity for the protection and conservation of the environment, by using healthy plants, more tolerant to biotic and abiotic stresses, thus requiring lower amounts of chemicals. For this reason, biotechnologies have been imposed with some success. Research has provided significant results in the field of in vitro cultures of cells and tissues, in the search for molecular markers (important research tools in supporting conventional breeding) and enzymes facilitating the extraction yields and degradation of primary and secondary products in many plant species, including the olive tree. In olive, the classical methods of genetic improvement have given rather scarce results up to now. At the same time, the need of new cultivars suitable for intensive cultivation demands for innovative strategies through the support of molecular and biotechnological techniques to speed up hybridisation methods by using "gene pools" method. This requires wide germplasm collections of both, cultivated and wild olive genotypes, and the knowledge of the olive genetic background. The present paper summarizes the state of art of the unconventional techniques (in vitro pollination, embryo rescue, dihaploids constitution, spontaneous and under selective pressure somaclonal variation, somatic hybridisation, germplasm conservation and genetic transformation). These techniques have provided good results in olive although they should be further encouraged with the aim to combine them with those derived from the classic genetics, genomics, biochemistry, cell biology, molecular and systems biology, to develop suitable strategies. All the aforementioned strategies can also be supported by the research on gene isolation and molecular markers used to characterize germplasm variability in order to improve the plasticity of cultivar behaviour and the quality of production. Suggestions concerning the use of both new molecular technologies and biotechnologies will be discussed.