Synthetic seeds as an application of mass production of somatic embryos

Production of encapsulatable unit, scale-up of the production system, and encapsulation technologies were developed as an integrated technology for transplant production using somatic embryos of celery and carrot. Encapsulatable units, somatic embryos improved in their quality for encapsulation, showed 80% conversion without encapsulation and any nutrient supply on a nursery medium in a greenhouse. The high conversion ability was also shown by carrot encapsulatable unit produced with a newly developed 8-liter culture jar, where 5.09×105 torpedo stage embryos were produced and 4.10×104 encapsulatable units were obtained from them.