Artificial Seed / Synthetic Seed Production – Brief Procedure – Advantages and Limitations

Synthetic seeds are the artificially encapsulated somatic embryos, shoot buds, cell aggregates, or any other tissue that possess the ability to convert into a plant under in vitro or in vivo conditions, retains the potentiality also after storage. Due to the quick development of somatic embryos it possess the potentiality for conservation and propagation of rare, endangered, critically endangered and threatened plants which are difficult to regenerate through conventional methods due to low seed set and poor seed germination. An improved artificial seed production technique is considered a valuable alternate technology of propagation in many commercially important crops and a significant method for mass propagation of elite plant genotypes. There are several advantages of artificial seeds such as ease of handling, low production cost, ease of exchange of plant materials, genetic uniformity of plantlets, direct delivery to the soil, shorten the breeding cycle and reduction of the storage space.