Dr. Luigi Catalano of Agrimeca Grape and Fruit Consulting and the Presidents of CIVI Italia(SOI) visited the Department of Cell and Tissue Culture of ABRII while participating in the National Symposium on Plant Tissue. The department’s achievements and the projects being in the pipeline were explained by Dr. Pejman Azadi, Deputy Director General for Technology of ABRII. Moreover, a brief history of the department was demonstrated.

Cell and Tissue Culture Department is one of the first sections inaugurated in Agricultural Biotechnology Research Institute of Iran (ABRII), initiating its projects in 1989 as “Tissue Culture Laboratory” of the Biotechnology and Physiology Sector of Seed and Plant Improvement Institute (SPII). For the next decade, the lab’s concentration was mostly on micropropagation of tropical fruit trees such as date, saccharum and banana, and haploid breeding through chromosome elimination in wheat and barley.

It is worth mentioning that CIVI-Italy associates nursery consortia operating on a national scale, which represents almost all of the Italian nursery industry organized in the sectors of the production of fruit plants, citrus fruits, olive trees, strawberry and horticultural plants, as well as National Unions of fruit and vegetable and olive growing producers. Its main statutory purpose is to enhance nursery productions to qualify fruit and vegetables, citrus and olive production to the utmost, through close collaboration with companies in the social base and with the authorities that oversee the qualification programs which are Ministry of Agricultural Policies, food and forestry (Mipaaf) and Regional Plant Protection Services (SFR). For this reason, the activity most developed by Civi-Italia is to promote the Italian excellence of the nursery industry through a broad adhesion to the national voluntary certification programs.