Vegetative propagation strategies in commercial pineapple cultivars

ABSTRACT The production of healthy pineapple seedlings for commercial plantations has been one of the main limiting factors of the species, and the search for improvements to meet this demand has been constant. Therefore, the present study aimed to compare different propagation strategies (natural tillering, stem sectioning, and micropropagation) in three commercial cultivars 'BRS Imperial', 'Pérola', and Gold 'MD-2' of pineapple. Three methods of vegetative propagation were evaluated: conventional, stem sectioning, and micropropagation. The evaluations consisted of the number of seedlings produced by each method and the period for their development until planting in the field. According to the conventional propagation technique results, the young seedling type in the cultivar 'Pérola' was more abundant. In the propagation by sectioning the stem, the 'BRS Imperial' cultivar presented the highest number of seedlings. Regarding the micropropagation technique, the highest production of shoots was observed in the third subculture for all cultivars, especially for ‘BRS Imperial’, which presented the highest total number of shoots in all subcultures. It was concluded that the micropropagation technique proved efficient in producing uniform seedlings on a large scale, in addition to having an advantage in the greater number of seedlings produced compared to the other methods studied.