IN VITRO MORPHOGENIC PERFORMANCE OF GINGER (Zingiber officinale) AS INFLUENCED BY MEDIA VARIATIONS

ABSTRACT
Ginger (Zingiber officinale Rose) is a perennial herb that grows from underground
rhizomes. The demand for fresh and dry ginger and its essential oil in the world market
is high. Ginger is propagated vegetatively using underground rhizomes. Most farmers
use planting materials saved from previous harvest. These materials could have been
sold for cash. Contingent on this, many farmers are reluctant to use healthy succulent
rhizomes for planting. These are rather sold thereby resulting in acute shortage of
planting materials.

Tissue culture technique can be applied to mass-produce seedlings
for distribution to ginger farmers. This however, is not cost effective now due to lack of
the necessary materials such as agar required for tissue culture. It is on the basis of
these considerations that the present research was set up to develop a locally available
and cheap protocol that is reproducible in ginger plant tissue culture work with the
following objectives:

To determine the best pre-initiation treatment for in-vitro ginger
multiplication; To determine the effect of plant growth hormones - auxin and cytokinin
on in-vitro propagation of ginger at the initiation stage using agar as a gelling agent; To
compare agar gelled medium with cassava gelled medium in in-vitro propagation of
ginger at the initiation stage. The research was carried out in the tissue culture research
laboratory of the National Root Crop Research Institute (NRCRI), Umudike Station,
Umuahia, Abia State. The explants were collected from ginger germplasm of the
Institute. The result shows that Sodium Hypochlorite (NaOCl) as 30% bleach and