Research and Development at Rahan Meristem

Rahan Meristem is an agro-biotech company with over 40 years’ experience in plant propagation and improvement. The Company’s R&D Department is among the leading biotechnology lab both in Israel and worldwide.
The R&D expertise covering wide range of skills including: genetics and breeding of fruit trees, viral elimination by tissue cultures, vegetable breeding via haploid cultures, tissue culture-based propagation, cell cultures, mutations induction in tissue cultures, genetic engineering, and genome editing (CRISPR).
The extensive knowledge and experience in these fields, positions the company as a world leader in solving agricultural problems using tissue culture- and cell-culture-based methods. Tremendous skills and specialized tools were developed for the propagation of crops that are not propagated by seeds.

We routinely develop protocols for culture-based plant propagation.

Plants that are propagated via tissue cultures have many advantages:

Protocols developed in recent years

Avocado rootstocks propagation via tissue culture

Blueberries propagation via tissue culture

Kiwi propagation via tissue culture

Breeding and improvement of plant varieties

The R&D Department has extensive experience in breeding and improving variety of crops.

We can affect a large number of plant traits:

Our breeding and improvement methods are based on cell and tissue cultures, and include:

Our new Banana variety:

Adi – a dwarf-like stature with high fruit yield

Varieties in development:

Resistant Banana to Fusarium (TR4)

Screening for resistant lines at Wageningen University (Netherlands) by TR4 infections

A lines that following the fungal infection showed the TR4 symptoms

B lines that following the fungal infection were asymptomatic.

The asymptomatic lines (B) from the greenhouse trials were transferred to a field trial in a heavily infected soils by TR4 in the Philippines.

The first yield of the asymptomatic lines in the field trial. To date, almost 95% of the banana plants did not show symptoms of contamination with TR4.

Plant viral elimination:

Rahan Meristem’s array of services include routine elimination of plants viruses using tissue culture-based methods. The virus elimination process is done by thermotherapy – the standard method for plants virus elimination in tissue cultures, and chemotherapy – the alternative method for eradicating plant viruses in tissue culture. For every crop, the we have developed a unique growing media according to the various propagation stages.

Sweet potatoes

We routinely clean sweet potatoes from a range of viruses. We retain a bank of clean plants in tissue culture for the various breeders and every year supply virus-free plants to the various breeders.

Grapevines

We routinely eliminate a range of grapevines viruses. Both varieties and rootstock can be cleaned.

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