Tropical plants
Glorimarie López Morales, B.S.
Keila Avilés López, B.S.
María M. Meléndez Ortega, M.S.
Juan A. Negrón Berríos, Ph.D.
Interamerican University of Puerto Rico
Barranquitas Campus
The micropropriation of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana is important in our laboratory as a control for phytoremediation studies. The tissue culture technique is an important tool for the aseptic development of plant species. Seedlings of Arabidopsis thaliana have been generated in the laboratory using seeds, but genetic variability presents a statistically significant problem. That is why we are carrying out in vitro culture using sterile fragments from the Arabidopsis thaliana leaf. These studies will help us to develop a progeny of seedlings with the same genotype. The initial phase of this experimentation was to take fragments of a sterile plant, developed from seeds, and cultivate them in Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium with different concentrations of the hormone indole acetic acid (IAA) to observe their development. Based on these tissue culture results, phytoremediation trials have been initiated. To carry out the same, A.thaliana seeds were disinfected and exposed to MS with 10ppm (10mg/L) and 100ppm (100mg/L) of lead, to observe the effect of the metal on germination. and growth. The preliminary results showed us that there is a delay in the germination of the seeds of 1 day. In addition to this, studies are being carried out on the genes for metallothioneins 2b, myosin XI and actin 1, by means of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR).