Advances in Direct and Indirect Organogenesis in Forest Trees: A Review

Trees are one of the major groups of plants that play pivotal roles in various ecosystem processes. Forest trees are major producers of various bioactive compounds, pharmaceutically important secondary metabolites, source of food, timber, and raw materials for various industries. But they face many challenges to their growth and existence like forest fire, pest attack, climatic changes affecting seed germination, and overall development as well as various anthropogenic effects like overexploitation for timber and edible products. Natural propagation of trees takes a long period for multiplication of plants and seed germination also faces limitations like longer dormancy period. To overcome these limitations and for faster and large-scale multiplication of these important forest trees, Micropropagation methods can be adopted. With this novel biotechnology method, rapid multiplication of disease-free and improved varieties of plants can be developed within a short span of time. Selection of suitable growth medium and plant growth regulators ensures the success of in vitro culturing of forest trees even though they show limitations like phenolic exudations which cause bacterial and fungal contamination.