Vegetable Grafting

Principles and Practices

Giuseppe Colla, Francisco Pérez-Alfocea, Dietmar Schwarz, Giuseppe Colla, Francisco Pérez-Alfocea, Dietmar Schwarz

• Publisher: CAB International
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781780648972
• eBook ISBN: 9781780648996
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book provides comprehensive, current scientific and applied practical knowledge on vegetable grafting, a method gaining considerable interest that is used to protect crops from soil-borne diseases, abiotic stress and to enhance growth/yield. Though the benefits of using grafted transplants are now fully recognized worldwide, understanding the rootstock-scion interactions under variable environmental pressures remains vital for grafting-mediated crop improvement. In this book the authors attend to this need and explain the reasons for, and methods and applications of, grafting.Vegetable Grafting: Principles and Practices covers:· rootstock breeding, signalling, and physiological and molecular mechanisms involved in grafting;· beneficial effects of grafting including reducing disease damage and abiotic stress;· side effects relating to the impact of grafting on fruit quality; and· practical applications and speciality crops.Including high-quality colour images and written by an international team of expert authors, this book provides up-to-date scientific data and is also concerned with translating science to the field. It is an essential resource for researchers, advanced technicians, practitioners and extension workers.

1 Introduction to Vegetable Grafting

ZHILONG BIE,^1* MUHAMMAD AZHER NAWAZ,^1,2 YUAN HUANG,¹ JUNG-MYUNG LEE³ AND GIUSEPPE COLLA⁴

¹Huazhong Agricultural University/Key Laboratory of Horticultural Plant Biology, Wuhan, PR China; ²Department of Horticulture, University College of Agriculture, University of Sargodha, Sargodha, Pakistan; ³formerly of Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Republic of Korea; ⁴University of Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy

^*[email protected]

1.1 Importance and Use of Vegetable Grafting

1.1.1 Historical perspective

Grafting is the art of joining together two plant parts (a rootstock and a scion) by means of tissue regeneration, in which the resulting combination of plant parts achieves physical reunion and grows as a single plant (Janick, 1986). It is a centuries-old technique but a relatively new one in vegetable cultivation. Various references to fruit grafting appear in the Bible and in ancient Greek and Chinese literature, suggesting that grafting was used in Europe, the Middle East and Asia by the 5th century BC (Melnyk and Meyerowitz, 2015). Grafting occurs commonly in nature, and the observation of natural grafts may have inspired human use of this technique in horticulture thousands of years ago (Mudge et al., 2009).

Grafting of fruit trees has been practised for thousands of years, but in vegetables this technique is a relatively new one. Self-grafting was used as a technique to produce large-sized gourd fruits, as reported in a Chinese book written in the 5th century and a Korean book written in the 17th century (Lee and Oda, 2003). However, commercial grafting of vegetables only originated in the early 20th century with the aim of managing soilborne pathogens (Louws et al., 2010).

Scientific vegetable grafting was first launched in Japan and Korea in the late 1920s by grafting watermelon on to gourd rootstocks to avoid soilborne diseases (Ashita, 1927; Yamakawa, 1983). This new technique was disseminated to farmers in Japan and Korea by the agricultural extension workers. In the early 1930s, the commercial use of grafted transplants was started in Japan by grafting watermelon on to bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria (Mol.) Standl) and summer squash (Cucurbita moschata Duch.) to induce resistance to Fusarium wilt (Oda, 2002; Sakata et al., 2007, 2008). Grafting of cucumber to reduce soilborne diseases and to enhance scion vigour is believed to have started in the 1920s but was not applied on a commercial scale until the 1960s (Sakata et al., 2008).

Among the Solanaceae crops, aubergine (Solanum melongena L.) was first grafted on to scarlet aubergine (Solanum integrifolium Lam.) in the 1950s (Oda, 1999). Similarly, grafting of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) was started in the 1960s (Lee and Oda, 2003). In the 1950s, the rapid development of protected cultivation with the use of greenhouses or tunnels for offseason vegetable production and intensive cropping patterns changed the existing crop rotation system; consequently, farmers became dependent on grafting to control soilborne pathogens and other pests (Kubota et al., 2008; Lee et al., 2010).

Scientific studies investigating and developing rootstocks was initiated in the 1960s in Korea. By 1990, the percentage of grafted Solanaceae and Cucurbitaceae (e.g. cucumber, melon, aubergine, tomato) had increased to 59% in Japan and 81% in Korea (Lee, 1994). Currently, most greenhouse-cultivated cucurbits are grafted in China, Japan, Korea, Turkey and Israel, while grafted vegetables are cultivated on a commercial scale in more than 20 countries worldwide (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1. Main countries where grafted vegetables are produced and/or cultivated on a commercial scale.

Continent	Countries
East Asia	China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines
Europe	Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Greece, Cyprus, Belgium, Portugal, Germany, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Middle East and North Africa	Turkey, Israel, Morocco, Egypt, Iran, Algeria
Americas	Mexico, Canada, the USA, Argentina

1.1.2 Purpose and scope

Although vegetable grafting in ancient times was intended mainly to produce large-sized gourds for rice storage (Hong, 1710; PSNCK, 1982), it expanded rapidly in many countries to control soilborne pathogens (e.g. root-knot nematodes) and foliar pathogens, to enhance plant vigour, to extend the harvesting period, to increase yield and fruit quality, to prolong postharvest life, to increase nutrient uptake, to allow tolerance to low and high temperatures, to cope with salinity and heavy-metal stress, and to increase tolerance to drought and waterlogging (Table 1.2; see Chapters 6 and 7, this volume).

Table 1.2. Benefits of vegetables grafting.

Benefit	Crop	Reference
Disease resistance to soilborne pathogens and foliar pathogens	Tomato, watermelon, aubergine, artichoke, cucumber, pepper, melon	Black et al. (2003); Bletsos et al. (2003); Bletsos (2005, 2006); Sakata et al. (2006, 2007, 2008); King et al. (2008); Lee et al. (2010); Louws et al. (2010); Kousik et al. (2012); Jang et al. (2012); Temperini et al. (2013); Gilardi et al. (2013a,b); Vitale et al. (2014); Arwiyanto et al. (2015); Miles et al. (2015); Shibuya et al. (2015); Suchoff et al. (2015)
Nematode resistance	Tomato	Dong et al. (2007); Lee et al. (2010); Louws et al. (2010)
Salt tolerance	Cucumber, pepper, watermelon, tomato	Huang et al. (2009); Colla et al. (2010, 2012, 2013); Huang et al. (2010, 2013a); Lee et al. (2010); Schwarz et al. (2010); Fan et al. (2011); Yang et al. (2012, 2013); Wahb-Allah (2014); Penella et al. (2015); Xing et al. (2015)
High- and low-temperature tolerance	Tomato, pepper, cucumber	Venema et al. (2008); Li et al. (2008); Lee et al. (2010); Schwarz et al. (2010); López-Marín et al. (2013)
Drought tolerance	Pepper, tomato	Lee et al. (2010); Schwarz et al. (2010); Penella et al. (2014); Wahb-Allah (2014)
Flooding tolerance	Tomato	Lee et al. (2010); Bhatt et al. (2015)
Nutrient uptake	Watermelon, tomato, melon	Kim and Lee (1989); Ruiz et al. (1997); Lee et al. (2010); Colla et al. (2010b, 2011); Huang et al. (2013b, 2016a,b); Schwarz et al. (2013); Huang et al. (2016a,b); Nawaz et al. (2016)
Yield increase	Watermelon, melon cucumber, tomato, aubergine, pepper, artichoke	Jeong (1986); Ruiz et al. (1997); Nisini et al. (2002); Colla et al. (2008); Huang et al. (2009); Lee et al. (2010); Gisbert et al. (2011); Moncada et al. (2013); Tsaballa et al. (2013); Temperini et al. (2013)
Fruit quality improvement	Tomato, cucumber, aubergine, pepper, melon, watermelon	Jeong (1986); Proietti et al. (2008); Huang et al. (2009); Lee et al. (2010); Rouphael et al. (2010); Gisbert et al. (2011); Zhao et al. (2011); Condurso et al. (2012); Krumbein and Schwarz (2013); Moncada et al. (2013); Tsaballa et al. (2013); Verzera et al. (2014); Kyriacou et al. (2016)
Scion vigour improvement	Cucumber	Jeong (1986); Lee et al. (2010)
Reproductive growth promotion	Cucumber	Jeong (1986); Lee et al. (2010)
Shelf-life/postharvest life improvement	Melon	Zhao et al. (2011)
Heavy metals/organic pollutants tolerance	Cucumber, tomato	Rouphael et al. (2008); Lee et al. (2010); Schwarz et al. (2010); Zhang et al. (2010a,b, 2013); Kumar et al. (2015a,b)
Extension of harvesting period	Cucumber	Jeong (1986); Itagi (1992); Ito (1992); Lee et al. (2010)
Weed control/management	–	Dor et al. (2010 ); Louws et al. (2010)
Production of new species (tetraploid)	Tobacco	Fuentes et al. (2014)

As well as myriad applications in advancing sustainable crop production, grafting can be used as a tool in both breeding and research. Recently, a group of researchers from Germany working on tobacco published a unique way of producing new allohexaploid tobacco species by using the graft site as propagation material in vitro (Fuentes et al., 2014); in this case, grafting can be seen as a breeding tool to generate novel genetic combinations – in a process that is conceptually similar to protoplast fusion – by hybridization at the cellular level, bypassing sexual compatibility barriers (see Chapter 3, this volume). Independent breedi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction to Vegetable Grafting
• 2 Genetic Resources for Rootstock Breeding
• 3 Rootstock Breeding: Current Practices and Future Technologies
• 4 Rootstock–scion Signalling: Key Factors Mediating Scion Performance
• 5 Physiological and Molecular Mechanisms Underlying Graft Compatibility
• 6 Grafting as Agrotechnology for Reducing Disease Damage
• 7 Grafting as a Tool for Tolerance of Abiotic Stress
• 8 Quality of Grafted Vegetables
• 9 Practical Applications and Speciality Crops
• Index
• Plates
• Back Cover