Morphological and agronomic evaluation of tissue culture derived Indian soybean plants

Somaclonal variation has become common for many plant species including soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merr). The present study was aimed to compare the morphological and yield characters of tissue culture derived and field grown soybean cultivar CO-3 (Coimbatore-3). With respect to the plants derived from tissue culture, the morphological characters such as length of roots, shoots, petioles, internodal region, number of leaf nodes, leaf area, fresh and dry weight of leaves and roots and yield contributing characters length of pods, number of flowers/ node, number of pods/ node, number of pods/ plant, number of seed aborted fruits and number of seeds/ pod were significantly (p>0.05) varied from parent or field grown plants, except seed yield. Even the variation was observed in both the type of plants, since the difference was not too large. We conclude that tissue culture technique is not detrimental for plant growth and performance and which is widely used in many genetic engineering techniques.