In vitro introduction of healthy and virus-infected genotypes of native Croatian grapevine cultivars

We evaluated the response of eight economically important Croatian grapevine cultivars and studied the impact of their sanitary status on in vitro introduction, by comparing the response of healthy and virus-infected genotypes of one cultivar. Nodal explant survival on three media, M1 (half-strength MS), M2 (full-strength MS) or M3 (full-strength MS with 4.4 µM L^?1 benzylaminopurine) was measured after 2 weeks and regrowth after 8 weeks. After 8 weeks, average shoot length and node number were significantly higher on M2 compared to M1 and M3. M3 induced significantly shorter average internode length, compared to M1 and M2. Survival of one healthy and of five cultivar Plavac mali genotypes infected with GFLV, GLRaV-1, GLRaV-3, GLRaV-3+GVA and GLRaV-1+GLRaV-3 was 97.5 and 82.8–87.5%, respectively. Regrowth of the healthy genotype reached 95.5%, but dropped to 5.5–31.4% in infected ones. The healthy genotype showed significantly higher shoot length (6.3 cm) and node number (7.3) compared to infected genotypes, with shoot length between 1.2–2.6 cm and node number between 1.2–3.0. By contrast, internode length was not significantly different between the healthy and the infected genotypes. The present work represents the first successful in vitro introduction for three of the eight native Croatian cultivars studied.