Botanical Garden to Become the Focus for Regional Commercial Planters

Clonal micropropagation for the mass production of the planting stock of economically valuable crops, is the latest technology in plant production. The meeting was attended by Valentina Echina, Deputy Head of the Department of Forestry and Game for Belgorod Region, Professor Valery Tokhtar, Head of the Botanical Gardens at BNRU, and representatives from farms, agro-industry and plant nurseries from across the Region.

In his welcoming address, Professor Tokhtar stressed the importance of cooperation between private firms, government and academia. He spoke on the latest developments being used to obtain healthy planting material in Western Europe and Russia using biotechnological methods, and went on to outline the facilities that BNRU uses to achieve its results, using the recent example of fulfilling the plans of the Governor, Evgeny Savchenko, for the introduction of new Lilac species to the Region's parks.

Then Dr Lyudmila Tokhtar gave those present a deeper insight into the specific methodology used by scientists at BNRU regarding clonal micropropagation. Dr Tokhtar presented data on the competitive advantages of this method for the mass reproduction of fruit and berry, and ornamental crops, and spoke some more about the main projects under way at the Plant Biotechnology Laboratory. She went on to suggest the most promising areas in Belgorod Region for growing particular varieties of plants that had been successfully reproduced in in vitro conditions, sterile cultures of which already existed in the laboratory.

A tour was then conducted around the facilities, where guests could see the results of the work of biotechnologists for themselves, including plants in all stages of clonal micropropagation. An enthusiastic consensus was achieved, that future cooperation between all parties would be of mutual benefit.