Very vanilla

Vanilla is the world’s second most popular flavour but the plant’s temperamental life cycle and propagation means it struggles to keeps up with demand – Malaysian scientists hope to give it a helping hand.

Scientists from the University of Nottingham’s Malaysian Campus (UNMC) hope to create new and robust methods for cloning some of the economic – and rarer – species of the Vanilla planifolia, the most cultivated vanilla orchid.

Traditionally vanilla is propagated by stem cuttings, but the method is labour intensive, time-consuming and uneconomical because it can damage the mother plant and cause a reduction in yield. Researchers hope that cloning a high quality parent plant from somatic cells will offer a viable and simple method for the large scale commercial production of vanilla plants.

However, variations in the sub-clones of one parental line can create ‘off-types’ which are not of the same quality as the parent plant. The off-types have to be scrapped, which can be costly. The researchers – who have just been awarded a Fundamental Research grant (FRGS) from the Malysian Ministry of Higher Education to use DNA marker systems to investigate how these mutations occur.

“Our research will help to provide a tool for tracking abnormality of growth occurring in tissue culture and will also attempt to understand how such abnormalities can occur after a number of sub-culturing in tissue culture,” said Dr Chin Chiew Foan.

DNA marker systems have been widely used to detect genetic similarities and differences in micropropagated material in various plants and are simple, quick and cost-effective for routine application.

“We are developing a tool that will explore the internal RNA sequence region to detect sequence variations,” said Dr Chin Chiew Foan. “Our initial results indicate that some variability of DNA fragments exists among these tissue culture samples under study. We are sending these DNA fragments for sequencing to reveal the level of mutations that has taken place.”