Franck Marionnet's family set up Al Wathba Marionnet with an Emirati partner in the UAE in 1998. Pawan Singh / The National
The date palm has been a key source of food in the Arabian Gulf for well over 5,000 years and its role in providing sustenance here shows no sign of fading.
Each year tens of thousands of people attend the Liwa Dates Festival, which runs until July 29, a vivid demonstration that dates remain as important a commodity as ever.
With more than 40 million date palms, the UAE is a key centre for the production of the fruit but it is also heavily involved in cloning date palms by tissue culture.
While there are other ways of propagating date palms, only sophisticated laboratory techniques can produce the tens of thousands of genetically identical plants needed by the date-growing industry each year.
Among the few companies able to propagate date palms on an industrial scale is Al Wathba Marionnet, an Emirati-French company with headquarters in Abu Dhabi and with tissue-culture laboratories and greenhouses at Al Khazna, between the capital and Al Ain.
Tissue culture will get rid of any disease and give you the capability to produce in high quantities; theres no other choice, said Franck Marionnet, the companys general manager.
Other companies involved in tissue culturing date palms are Green Coast Nurseries in Fujairah, which collaborates with a UK company, Date Palm Developments, which has tissue-culture laboratories in south-west England.
In addition, UAE University has a date palm tissue culture laboratory that propagates date palms and sells them commercially.
The UAE is a hub for this business because, from the late 1990s, authorities offered tenders for companies to supply thousands of tissue-cultured date palms, said Buthaina Khazal, managing partner of Green Coast Nurseries. These plants were subsequently passed on to farmers.
Mrs Khazal said support from Sheikh Zayed, the UAEs Founding Father, was key to the technologys adoption. However, even now, the techniques remain problematic.
Date palms were one of the last things [scientists] worked on with tissue culture, and the most difficult, said Mrs Khazal.
Mr Marionnet described the use of tissue culture with date palms as very, very specific and something that so few laboratories are able to carry out successfully.
So many started and closed; they cannot succeed, he said. If youre producing strawberries, its very easy. Technically [with date palms] its very, very difficult. Every day we have failures and successes.
We keep improving all the time but we havent produced the ideal production capability and ideal ease of production.
Like other flowering plants, date palms can reproduce by seed. However, because these seeds are created by mixing the genetic material of a male and female plant, they vary from one to another, so the resulting plants may not be consistent in their yield of dates or other characteristics.
Also, it is just female date palms that produce dates, so farmers do not want to waste time and resources growing plants only to find they are male.
As an alternative, female plants can be cloned, generating offspring genetically identical to the parent. One method involves taking offshoots, which are small versions of the plant that grow out from the base of the trunk, and growing them into trees.
When you have a big tree, you have a small one growing from its foot. This one you can take; it will be exactly the same, said Mr Marionnet.
[However], within the lifespan of one adult tree, it will produce 10 to 15 daughters; its not enough to supply the demand.
Also, if the mother plant has a disease, a daughter plant grown from an offshoot will have the same condition. Mr Marionnet said only about 60 per cent of offshoots grow successfully.
So instead, tissue culture, which involves taking tiny pieces of plant derived from offshoots and growing them under laboratory conditions, is used.
The Marionnet family, which has an agricultural company in France with more than a century of history, set Al Wathba Marionnet up with an Emirati partner in the UAE in 1998 because the country is a key market for date palms. They employ 35 people, most in the laboratories and greenhouses, and produces 200,000 to 250,000 date palms each year, many exported to India, Pakistan, Central America, Africa and many Middle Eastern countries.
Green Coast Nurseries, which also exports all over the world, has an 86-hectare nursery where annually it grows more than 100,000 palms, including types of palm other than the date palm, such as the Listona fan palm. The company also has a large date farm.
Mrs Khazal said early varieties of date palm produce fruits from June onwards and the harvesting season runs until October. Most varieties come mid-season - June, July, August. Right now [at] our farm you will see an army of people. They work early morning and in the afternoon, she said.
The date palm industry has methods to ripen dates in storage, allowing them to be harvested early.
Other countries to have date palm tissue culture facilities include Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Spain.
How date palms are cloned by tissue culture
Producing date palms by tissue culture typically involves cutting out small sections of the growing part of offshoots and planting them in a nutrient medium before keeping them in the dark. New shoots are generated and are cut out and planted separately. After about six months of growth, the small plants are put in pots and may be kept in a high humidity section of a greenhouse before further growth in a regular area of a greenhouse. Al Wathba Marionnet keeps plants for between eight months and a year in a greenhouse, by which time they are large enough to be sent by air to customers. They are packed in boxes that hold 25 plants and that fit in air-freight pallets. Customers can expect plants to start producing dates after three to five years. The prices charged vary from one date palm variety to another. Al Wathba Marionnet produces about 16 varieties, while the date palm tissue culture laboratory at UAE University publishes a list of 18 varieties that it sells, the most expensive of which, Barhee and Majhool, cost Dh150 per plant. One variety, Khlass, sells for Dh140 each, while the remaining 15 varieties, among them Sultana, Lulu, Debbas and Khadri, are Dh130 per plant. The laboratory pledges that plants will be true-to-type to the variety, be free of pests or diseases, have a strong root system and be able to grow more rapidly than normal offshoots. If looked after properly, survival rates are said to be nearly 100 per cent.
Continue reading here:
Date palm cloning ensures traditional UAE industry has a sweet future - The National
- What is Cloning? - Learn Genetics - December 12th, 2016 [December 12th, 2016]
- Pros and Cons of Cloning - Buzzle - December 21st, 2016 [December 21st, 2016]
- Cloning/Embryonic Stem Cells - National Human Genome Research ... - December 22nd, 2016 [December 22nd, 2016]
- Is human cloning wrong? | Debate.org - December 25th, 2016 [December 25th, 2016]
- Cloning - Science Daily - December 29th, 2016 [December 29th, 2016]
- Cloning - The New York Times - January 4th, 2017 [January 4th, 2017]
- Mammoth - Wikipedia - January 24th, 2017 [January 24th, 2017]
- Molecular Cloning: Basics and Applications | Protocol - January 25th, 2017 [January 25th, 2017]
- Beware Of 'Facebook Cloning' | 9news.com - 9NEWS.com - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- Facebook scam lets hackers clone your account and STEAL money ... - Express.co.uk - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- Beware of 'Facebook Cloning' | KGW.com - kgw.com - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- Beware of Facebook 'cloning' scam - USA TODAY - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- Facebook cloning debunked - The i newspaper online iNews - iNews - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- Don't fall for this Facebook cloning scam | WFLA.com - WFLA - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- 20 years after Dolly the sheep, human cloning is no closer - Genetic Literacy Project - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- Don't fall for this Facebook cloning scam | WDTN - WDTN - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- This Crab Clones Its Allies by Ripping Them in Half - The Atlantic - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- Boffins create quantum cloning machine to intercept 'secure' messages - The INQUIRER - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- Hair Cloning & Multiplication | Bernstein Medical - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- Crustacean Cloning - ScienceBlog.com (blog) - February 8th, 2017 [February 8th, 2017]
- Watch out for this crazy Facebook cloning scam! - Komando - February 8th, 2017 [February 8th, 2017]
- Steve Bannon's Unproduced Movie About Cloning, Nazis, and Walt Disney Sounds Nuts - Gizmodo India - February 9th, 2017 [February 9th, 2017]
- Quantum Cloning Machine Reveals Clues That Could Protect Against Hacking - Photonics.com - February 9th, 2017 [February 9th, 2017]
- Steve Bannon wanted to make a movie about cloning, abortion, and Nazis with Mel Gibson - A.V. Club (blog) - February 9th, 2017 [February 9th, 2017]
- Police investigating recent reports of credit card cloning in Aiken ... - Aiken Standard - February 10th, 2017 [February 10th, 2017]
- Steve Bannon's Unproduced Movie About Cloning, Nazis, and Walt ... - Gizmodo - February 10th, 2017 [February 10th, 2017]
- Phone cloning - Wikipedia - February 11th, 2017 [February 11th, 2017]
- Gang arrested for cloning debit cards, stealing money - The Hindu - The Hindu - February 11th, 2017 [February 11th, 2017]
- Drive cloning in Windows 10 with free tools - Computerworld - February 12th, 2017 [February 12th, 2017]
- Cloning - The Hastings Center - February 12th, 2017 [February 12th, 2017]
- Scientists Are Close to Cloning a Woolly Mammoth - Popular Mechanics - February 16th, 2017 [February 16th, 2017]
- Antiquities Minister inaugurates first Pharaonic cloning center in Luxor - Egypt Independent - February 18th, 2017 [February 18th, 2017]
- 20 years after Dolly: Everything you always wanted to know about ... - Source - February 18th, 2017 [February 18th, 2017]
- 20 years after Dolly: Everything you always wanted to know about the cloned sheep and what came next - New Delhi Times - February 20th, 2017 [February 20th, 2017]
- 20 years after Dolly: Everything you always wanted to know about ... - The Conversation US - February 20th, 2017 [February 20th, 2017]
- Must reads: Populism, sexism, cloning, and rudeness - GlobalComment.com - February 20th, 2017 [February 20th, 2017]
- More lessons from Dolly the sheepis a clone really born at age ... - Phys.Org - February 20th, 2017 [February 20th, 2017]
- 15 Animals That Have Been Successfully Cloned by Scientists - Interesting Engineering - February 21st, 2017 [February 21st, 2017]
- Facebook does it again. WhatsApp launches revamped Status, cloning Snapchat - Catch News - February 22nd, 2017 [February 22nd, 2017]
- It's Been 20 Years Since We Cloned A Sheep. Why Haven't We Done The Same With Humans? - GOOD Magazine - February 22nd, 2017 [February 22nd, 2017]
- Reviving woolly mammoths will take more than two years - BBC News - February 23rd, 2017 [February 23rd, 2017]
- 20 years after Dolly the sheep's debut, Americans remain skeptical of cloning - Pew Research Center - February 23rd, 2017 [February 23rd, 2017]
- Another cloning success shows technology being used by everyday graziers - ABC Online - February 24th, 2017 [February 24th, 2017]
- 20 Years After Dolly, Where Are We With Cloning? - Inverse - February 24th, 2017 [February 24th, 2017]
- Pabrai And The Shameless Cloning Portfolio - Seeking Alpha - February 24th, 2017 [February 24th, 2017]
- As Clone Conspiracy Ends, the Fates of Two Major Spider-Man Villains Are Revealed - Gizmodo - February 24th, 2017 [February 24th, 2017]
- 20 years after Dolly the sheep, potential of cloning remains unclear - CNN - February 24th, 2017 [February 24th, 2017]
- More lessons from Dolly the sheep: Is a clone really born at age zero ... - Salon - February 27th, 2017 [February 27th, 2017]
- 20th Anniversary of Dolly the Cloned Sheep | Men's Health - Men's Health - February 28th, 2017 [February 28th, 2017]
- The Angels had two No. 97s on the basepaths, may be cloning their players - MLB.com - March 1st, 2017 [March 1st, 2017]
- 20 Years After Dolly: Cloning Past, Present and Future - KQED - March 2nd, 2017 [March 2nd, 2017]
- Facts About Cloning - Live Science - March 2nd, 2017 [March 2nd, 2017]
- Is Max cloning Tracey the barmaid to take over Walford in ... - Metro - Metro - March 2nd, 2017 [March 2nd, 2017]
- We know Dolly the sheep was cloned 20 years ago, but how old was she at birth? - Washington Post - March 3rd, 2017 [March 3rd, 2017]
- 'Miracle of nature' Scientists a step closer to HUMAN CLONING after creating mouse embryos - Express.co.uk - March 3rd, 2017 [March 3rd, 2017]
- Waxhaw police: Man charged with credit card cloning - WSOC Charlotte - March 4th, 2017 [March 4th, 2017]
- Facebook gives zero fucks about cloning Snapchat, adds geostickers in Instagram - TNW - March 8th, 2017 [March 8th, 2017]
- This man is cloning old-growth redwoods and planting them in safe places (video) - Treehugger - March 9th, 2017 [March 9th, 2017]
- Police warn of criminals cloning credit cards using stolen information - ABC Action News - March 11th, 2017 [March 11th, 2017]
- Hard drive imaging vs. cloning: What's the difference? - Windows Central - March 11th, 2017 [March 11th, 2017]
- Cloning Your VS 2017 Packages - Microsoft - Channel 9 (blog) - April 8th, 2017 [April 8th, 2017]
- Hair Cloning is Happening - NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth - April 8th, 2017 [April 8th, 2017]
- Woodbury Police Need Your Help In Credit Card Cloning Case - Patch - Patch.com - April 8th, 2017 [April 8th, 2017]
- Reasons Against Cloning - VIDEOS & ARTICLES - April 8th, 2017 [April 8th, 2017]
- B.o.B Talks Conspiracy Theories About 9/11, Snapchat, Cloning, Chemtrails, The Illuminati & More (VIDEO) - AllHipHop (blog) - June 6th, 2017 [June 6th, 2017]
- International grifter gets 5 years in prison for Denver credit card cloning scam - The Denver Post - June 6th, 2017 [June 6th, 2017]
- Send in the clones: Orphan Black, TV's smartest show, is back - The Guardian - June 7th, 2017 [June 7th, 2017]
- Sorry, 'Jurassic Park' fans: Scientists say dinosaur cloning probably isn't going to happen - Travel+Leisure - June 7th, 2017 [June 7th, 2017]
- Preparing winemakers for climate change through cloning - ABC Online - June 7th, 2017 [June 7th, 2017]
- Skimming, cloning become popular in Tulsa - KRMG - June 7th, 2017 [June 7th, 2017]
- Five Rules For Successful Marijuana Cloning - June 7th, 2017 [June 7th, 2017]
- Cloning Grapes Will Save Australian Wine - National Geographic Australia - June 8th, 2017 [June 8th, 2017]
- Hackers caught cloning activist Twitter accounts to spread fake news - The Independent - June 9th, 2017 [June 9th, 2017]
- Cloning Yourself in Photos or Videos - Fstoppers - June 11th, 2017 [June 11th, 2017]
- Cloning to the rescue - New Scientist - June 14th, 2017 [June 14th, 2017]
- Cloning To Revive Abaco Wild Horses - Bahamas Tribune - June 17th, 2017 [June 17th, 2017]
- How Close Are We to Successfully Cloning the First Human? - Futurism - June 22nd, 2017 [June 22nd, 2017]
- Magnified: Cloning - The Hawk Eye (blog) - June 24th, 2017 [June 24th, 2017]
- Puppies cloned from ears arrive in Russia for genetic research ... - RT - June 24th, 2017 [June 24th, 2017]
- Three waiters arrested in Mumbai for fraud and cloning ATM cards ... - Hindustan Times - June 26th, 2017 [June 26th, 2017]