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You Are Here: Home » Feature Articles » Generating disease free cocoa planting materials
Cocoa is the mainstay of Ghana’s economy and will remain so for a while, even with all this hue and cry about oil, the black gold. Beyond it being a major foreign exchange earner and a key source for financing capital projects, cocoa serves as the raw material for numerous consumer products such as chocolates and have made its way into the pharmaceutical industry in recent times.
To the peasant farmer, it is an important perennial tree crop which generates income for the up keep of the family, and, to the researcher, whose primary concern is to ensure its continued existence with better performance cocoa is a fascinating tree crop with numerous challenges for each category of research specialists. It comes as no surprise then that as far back as 1662, Dr Joseph Bachot referred to cocoa as “the food for gods.”
Cocoa is however, besieged with many pest and disease problems. In West Africa, four distinct groups of viruses have been recognised to infect cocoa. Cocoa swollen shoot virus (CSSV) is by far the most economically important and has been for many years a major problem for the cocoa industries of Ghana and Nigeria and more recently Togo.
The financial impact of cocoa production losses attributed to CSSV has been enormous in West Africa. Even where overall losses do not appear to be great, local areas or economies have been severely affected.
CSSV is transmitted by the mealybugs and it is believed that the CSSV was present in the forest regions of West Africa before the introduction of cocoa. Records indicates that the disease was first discovered in the Eastern Region of Ghana in the 1930′s and is now predicted to be found in all cocoa growing areas of the country.
Symptoms of the disease come in different shades of colours but by far yellowish venation of the leaves is common, and swollen of the stems and root resulting in the death of the tee.
Various attempts at controlling CSSV in the past including; biological control of the nealybug vector, chemotherapy and heat therapy of planting naterials, removal of wild hosts, breeding for CSSV resistance, destruction of visibly infected cocoa trees termed “zero tolerance”, and the use of mild strain in cross-protection have yielded at least, partial success.
All is not lost though. There is hope and sooner a solution to the CSSV threat could be found. In a series of experiments as part of my PhD research at the University of Reading, UK, the tissue culture technique was applied to CSSV infected cocoa trees and all cases showed positive signs of eliminating the virus.
The field of plant tissue culture is based on the premise that plants can be separated (organs.,tissues or cells), which can be manipulated in vitro (in test tubes) and then grown back into complete plants.
With advances in cocoa tissue culture in vitro somatic embryogenesis system (naked seed production), has opened new opportunities for vegetative propagation and distribution of cocoa.
Somatic embryogenesis has been applied to a number of perennial tree crops to eliminate viruses. Somatic embryogenesis from stigma and style cultures of citrus (orange trees) was used to eliminate Citrus psorosis from citrus species. Somatic embryogenesis was also effective in eliminating fan leaf viruses and leaf roll-associated viruses from grapevines.
The technique was equally effective in eliminating the CSSV from infected cocoa trees producing disease free embryos and plantlets. The effectiveness of somatic embryogenesis as a technique in eliminating the CSSV was further demonstrated by plantlets testing CSSV negative by capillary electrophoresis two years after weaning in the glasshouse.
This technique makes it ideal for the selection of disease free cocoa trees for breeding programmes and the development of genetic transformation. It also has an important role to play in- cocoa germplasm conservation and distribution.
While the entire country anxiously wait for the oil industry to emerge and hopefully take over from cocoa and other traditional foreign exchange earners, it is still relevant that we do everything possible to support cocoa and other traditional commodities for as we are told “‘The devil you know is better than the angel you don’t know.”
Credit: Dr. A. K. Quainoo
Email: aquainoo@googlemail.com
Source: Daily Graphic