Commercial Production of Healthy Plants of Virus free Lilies

Abstract

Lilies are among the top ten cut flowers of the world. It is very important flower and it is quite diverse in form and colour. The lilies are high in demand in floriculture industries both as cut flower and pot plant. Lilies are commonly .grown in hills having mild climate and also in the plains during the winter season. In India planting material is being imported at very high cost but the material has been often found to be infected with viral diseases. The limiting factor in large-scale cultivation of lilies is its susceptaibility to large number of diseases caused by viruses. Viruses are important considerations for successful commercial production of planting material. As lilies are propagated vegetatively, therefore all infected bulbs used for forcing, propagate the virus from one generation to the other. Enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), electron microscopy (EM) and reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) have been used to efficiently index the viruses from lilium bulbs. In order to improve the quality of lilies, tissue culture techniques plays unimportant role for lilium industry recovering virus-free planting materials as well as their mass multiplication from virus infected plants.