Unpollinated Ovaries Used to Produce Doubled Haploid Lines in Durum Wheat.

The use of doubled haploid lines improves the efficiency of cultivar development and homozygous genotypes can be obtained in one generation, as opposed to conventional line production, which requires several cycles of self-pollination. However, in durum wheat (Triticum turgidum subsp. durum Desf.), the low efficiency of green plant regeneration and the very high frequency of albino plants hinder the application of this technique.We observed the success of using gynogenesis for durum wheat and the significant influence of growing conditions on ovary and callus development, and on plant regeneration. Our results suggested that the cold pretreatment for 2 weeks is efficient for durum wheat. Furthermore, the addition of 2,4-D, vitamins and glutamine, and the use of maltose as sugar source in media improved the ovary regeneration. We describe in this work an efficient method to regenerate green plants from in vitro durum wheat gynogenesis .