NovaCane® Production at the Plant Protection Hub

The Plant Protection Hub Laboratory (PPH) has a license agreement with SASRI to produce released varieties of sugarcane using the registered NovaCane® protocol. Using this method, the sugarcane plants that are produced in tissue culture are disease-free and certified true-to-type.

As depicted by the flow chart below, producing NovaCane® plantlets is not as straightforward as planting a stick of cane. Once the treated single budded setts have germinated, the meristem is excised under sterile conditions using a microscope. The meristem is a very small bundle of cells that are found in the growth points of plants. They are like the stem cells of the plant world. With the right stimulus from plant growth regulators (plant hormones), the excised cells can be guided to form both shoots and roots.

The first step is to initiate growth in the excised meristem which produces a shoot. This shoot begins to grow and multiply until hundreds or thousands of cloned plants are produced. Each tiny meristem has the potential to produce thousands of plants in tissue culture.

Once the plants have produced enough shoots, they are moved into nutrient media containing plant growth regulators that stimulate root production in plants. After each plantlet has developed its own initial root system, they are sent to a nursery for hardening off. This process is very important because up until this point the plants have been maintained in sterile conditions with all the nutrients easily available, and would not survive in the field without conditioning.

Throughout the process the plants are sampled and are sent to SASRI to be certified and verified that the plants remain true-to-type and that there has been no contamination from other varieties, both in the lab and in the nursery. This process ensures that the plant material received by the growers is of the highest standard.

NovaCane® plants form the foundation of the sugarcane certification scheme.