GENOTYPE AND PLANT GROWTH HORMONE INTERACTION EFFECT ON In vitro PROPAGATION OF EARLY MATURING ENSET (Ensete ventricosum (Welw.) Cheesman) CULTIVARS

Enset (Ensete ventricosum (Welw.) Chessman) has socio-cultural, ethno-medicinal and economic use values. Conventional Production of enset planting materials relies on several cost- intensive and inefficient methods including propagation is time consuming and is at the expense of a mature mother corm. Nearly all enset genotypes are being threatened by bacterial wilt disease upon conventional propagation. Constraint of early maturing enset cultivars is also the other bottle-neck for enset producer and the conventional propagation methods is not efficient to allocate the recently released early maturing enset cultivars to enset producers. Therefore, the current study was designed to investigate the effects of genotype and plant growth Hormones interaction effect on in vitro propagation of the three recently released early maturing enset cultivars to boost its planting materials. Shoot tip explants of Yanbule, Mesena and endale were cultured on Murashige and Skoog (MS) media supplemented with varied type, combination and concentrations of plant growth regulators. Hence, the effect of BA, Kn alone or in combination with NAA for shooting response and IBA alone or in combination with BA on in vitro rooting response of enset genotype was evaluated. Compared to the control, almost all levels of hormone treatments had positive impact on all parameters measured from shoot multiplication and rooting experiments. However, of all hormonal treatments, only specific hormone types, concentrations and mixes resulted in better performance in shooting and rooting experiments (p=0.05). During plantlets acclimatization the survival rate was 100% for all cultivars which was investigated on red soil and sand mixture only. The present study suggesting that genotype difference evokes varying response to the same PGRs. Therefore, due to the genotype specificity on response of many enset cultivars to tissue culture media, it is recommended that these hormone type and concentration be used for effective in vitro propagation of these cultivars.