The lust green JAU, Junagadh campus famously known as Motibag is situated in the heart of Junagadh city about 5 km from the railway station and 3 kms from bus station.
The JAU, Junagadh campus has total land area 754.62 ha and 2485 ha including 17 sub centers and 1500 manpower with annual budget around 28.5 crores.
JAU(Junagadh Agricultural University) readies to reap the benefits of its tissue culture programme.
In A bid to double agricultural produce, while at the same time make it cost effective, Junagadh Agriculture University (JAU) has commenced an ambitious tissue culture training study programme.
On anvil are also tissue culture production plans on a commercial basis to provide high yield tissue culture plants to farmers of the region.
JAU's department of agronomy has achieved remarkable success in tissue culture development with the help of the state-of-the-art technology laboratory, a first of its kind in the Saurashtra region.
Tissue culture is a technique to grow plants by culturing and maintaining plants cells or organs like leaves, stem, root, branch shoot tip, petals, anther and pollen in sterile, nutritionally and environmentally supportive conditions in vitro. The technique is widely used for micro propagation of banana and sugarcane crops.
Dr V P Chovatia, head of the department of agronomy, JAU, said, "With the use of this technique, plants have been prepared in the laboratory, which are disease free, contains uniform growth and can be obtained throughout the year. Besides, thousands of plants can be produced from a single selected plant," he said.
According to Dr Chovatia, the harvesting period for crop prepared with tissue culture plantation is 25 per cent less than normal. The crop growth is also uniform with almost zero crop loss due to the disease, which consequently leads to more yield, and thereby more profit.
So, cultivation based on tissue culture can prove to be commercially more profitable, which could make our farmers and economy stronger, he said.
Under the direct supervision and guidance of Professor K H Dabhi, the first batch of 20 students has now completed the tissue culture study programme.
When contacted, Dr Dabhi said, "Our prime object is to create awareness about the benefits of tissue culture technique among students and farmers. Apart from banana and sugarcane, tissue culture plants can be prepared among various horticulture crops particularly date palms, roses and gerbera crops. In addition to this, experiments are also under progress on medicinal plants in the JAU laboratory," he said. "Multiple advantage of tissue culture technique includes conservation of biodiversity through biotechnology cryo-preservation," he further said.
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