Dennien S. et al. Growing Healthy Sweetpotato: Best Practices for Producing Plant Material

Canberra: Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), 2013. — 176 p. — (ACIAR Monograph No. 153).
ACIAR Monographs – ISSN 1031-8194 (print), ISSN 1447-090X (online).
ISBN 978 1 922137 23 4 (print).
ISBN 978 1 922137 24 1 (online).This manual is aimed at researchers and technicians who may be new to pathogen-tested (PT) schemes for sweetpotato (Ipomoea batatus). It updates a previous publication (Beetham and Mason 1992) on the subject for the Pacific islands, and shows how simple the process can be.
In this manual, the authors describe, in simple terms, all the important stages of a modern PT scheme. They aim to demystify a process that can sound daunting, and encourage others to try these methods on sweetpotato and other important root and tuber crops.Contents:
Collecting, transporting and growing plants in pots.
Information to collect: a note on passport data.
Collection data: information to record when collecting vines and storage roots.
Collecting and preparing vines for transport.
Collecting and preparing storage roots for transport.
Growing collections in pots.
A note on watering.
Establishing plants in tissue culture.
Collecting vines for tissue culture.
Preparing shoot tips and node cuttings for tissue culture.
Placing shoot tips and node cuttings in tissue culture.
Incubating shoot tips and node cuttings in the laboratory.
Subculturing plants in the laboratory.
Heat therapy.
Pot method.
Tissue culture method.
Meristem culture.
Culture of meristems from heat-treated potted plants.
Culture of meristems from heat-treated plants in tissue culture.
Tests for viruses: indicator plants.
Transferring plants from tissue culture to pots.
Virus indexing: indicator plants.
Tests for viruses: ELISA and PCR.
Virus indexing: ELISA.
Virus indexing: PCR.
Putting it all together.
Preservation: leaf samples, viruses and tissue cultures.
Preservation of leaf samples.
FTA cards.
Long-term storage of sweetpotato plants in tissue culture.
Mass propagation of plants: the Queensland experience.
Establishment of plants in the screen house.
Multiplication of sweetpotato.
Harvesting and packing the storage roots.
Producing vines on-farm from PT storage roots.
Using PT roots as planting material.Formula for calculating bleach concentration.
Potting mixes: Australia and Papua New Guinea.
Personal protective equipment.
Best practice for the screen house environment.
Best practice for tissue culture laboratories.
Multiplicatnion and meristem medium recipe.
Making the media.
Sweetpotato indexing record sheet.
Passport descriptors for sweetpotato.