Curcuma is a commercially important medicinal and spice plant used in the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries for the synthesis of health-promoting curcuminoids and essential oils that helps to reduce the incidence of many ailments in humans. Curcuma, being a sterile triploid with a deprived seed setting, is vegetatively propagated underground rhizomes. Diseases such as rhizome rot and foliar infections have reduced the productivity of Curcuma. Although, vegetative propagation using traditional approaches results in plants that are true to type, which is not economical and the chemical composition of commercial rhizomes varies according to genotypes and processing methods under field conditions. Plant propagation through in vitro techniques has made the multiplication of plants easier in a faster way as compared to conventional methods. A liquid-based micropropagation system using bioreactors yields plantlets with higher biomass and increased multiplication rates. The assessment of clonal fidelity of micropropagated plants is very important as they are produced at a large scale during commercial application and can periodically be confirmed using molecular markers. The present review aims to provide recent information of Curcuma species micropropagation used for shoot multiplication, microrhizome production, and genetic fidelity analysis for maintaining homogeneity of in vitro generated plants.
Key words: Curcuma, Micropropogation, Liquid culture medium, Microrhizome, Clonal fidelity
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