Tea is one of the most important non-alcoholic beverage drinks worldwide. Although conventional breeding and propagation contributed significantly for last several decades to improve this crop. Moreover, tea is a unique horticultural crop which not only grow as monoculture but also the tender shoots and foliage harvested at periodic intervals from the very second year after planting to 100 or more years. Thus tea plant experiences several biotic and abiotic stresses through out the life. Therefore application of biotechnology become attractive to overcome the limitations of conventional breeding coupled with the demand for increasing productivity with lower cost of production. The various approaches such as microproopagation, genetic transformation and molecular biology which are applied to the Indian tea cultivar are discussed here.
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