Cryopreservation of peach and nectarine pollen grains

Abstract

The objective of this research was to investigate the conservation of pollen grains of peach and nectarine under different storage environments. Pollen of ‘Aurora 1’, ‘Douradão’, ‘Centenária’ and ‘Colombina’ were stored in cryotubes and conserved under four environments: ambient temperature (25°C), refrigerator (5°C), freezer (-12°C) and liquid nitrogen (-196°C, cryoconservation) for a 300 day period. After that a second field experiment was set up to test the viability of pollen grains. This was done through controlled crosses using the pollen grains from the previous conservation evaluation. Only pollen from refrigerator (5°C), freezer (-12°C) and liquid nitrogen (-196°C) storage were used because these were the only methods that conserved pollen viability. The liquid nitrogen (-196°C) was the best method to conserve the pollen grains of all the tested cultivars. Higher viability of pollen and on field fruit set percentage was obtained with the pollen conserved in liquid nitrogen (-196°C) for all cultivars. The highest percentage of field fruit set was obtained with ‘Aurora 1’ pollen conserved in liquid nitrogen (-196°C).