The growing demand for native planting material in ecological restoration and rehabilitation for agro-silvo-pastoral ecosystems has resulted in a major global industry in their sourcing, multiplication, and sale. Plant tissue culture is used for producing high-quality, disease-free, and true-to-type plants at a fast rate. Micropropagation can help to meet the increasing demand for planting material and afforestation programs. However, in vitro plant propagation is an expensive technique compared to conventional methods using suckers, seeds, and cuttings. Therefore, adopting measures to lower production costs without compromising plant quality is essential. This can be achieved by improving the culture media composition. Incorporating organic growth additives can stimulate tissue growth and increase the number of shoots, leaves, and roots in culture media. Organic growth supplementation speeds up the formation and development of cultures and yields vigorous plants. Plant regeneration from meristems (shoot tips and axillary buds) is a reliable way to produce true-to-type plants compared with callus and somatic embryogenesis regeneration, but in vitro culture environments can be mutagenic. Therefore, detecting somaclonal variations at an early stage of development is considered crucial in propagating plants. The genetic stability of in vitro regenerated plants needs to be ascertained by using DNA-based molecular markers. This review aims to provide up-to-date research progress on incorporating organic growth additives to enhance in vitro tissue culture protocols and to emphasize the importance of using PCR-based molecular markers such as RAPD, ISSR, SSR, and SCoT. The review was assessed based on the peer-reviewed works published in scientific databases including Science Direct, Scopus, Springer, JSTOR, onlinelibrary, and Google Scholar.

The date palm, a central plant in the fragile oasis ecosystem, is considered one of the fruit species most tolerant to salt stress. However, the tolerance mechanisms involved are yet to be addressed and their evaluation until now was mainly based on heterogenous plant material such as seedlings or limited to in vitro experiment conditions. For these reasons, we propose to deepen our knowledge of the morphological and physiological responses to salt stress using acclimated ex vitro plants resulting from the propagation of a single genotype. The plants were irrigated with 0, 150, 300, or 450 mM NaCl solutions for four months. Our results showed that the influence of water salinity on growth and ion-homeostasis regulation was very dependent on stress levels. The 150 mM NaCl concentration was found to improve dry biomass by about 35%, but at higher salt concentrations (300 and 450 mM) it decreased by 40–65%. The shoot:root dry mass ratio decreased significantly at the 150 mM NaCl water concentration and then increased with increasing water salt concentration. The leaf:root ratio for Na⁺ and Cl⁻ decreased significantly with increasing water salinity up to a concentration of 300 mM NaCl, and then stabilized with similar values for 300 mM and 450 mM NaCl. In contrast to Na⁺ and Cl⁻, leaf K⁺ content was significantly higher in the leaf than in the root for all salt treatments. Unlike Na⁺ and K⁺, Cl⁻ was expelled to the surface of leaves in response to increased water salinity. Overall, date palm plants appear to be more capable of excluding Cl⁻ than Na⁺ and of changing biomass allocation according to salt-stress level, and their leaves and roots both appear to play an important role in this tolerance strategy.

Recently, many horticultural crops have been subjected to study under hydroponic and aquaponic conditions, with a view to enhance their productivity. Nevertheless, a comparative analysis of these two soilless cultivation systems has rarely been undertaken, despite the fact that they represent two distinct approaches. This study’s objective was to compare between the aquaponic cultivation system and the hydroponic one, with the aim of identifying the most suitable soilless system for cultivating Genovese basil (O. basilicum L. cv. Genovese). For the purpose of this study, a factorial randomized complete block with three repetitions was conducted. It was carried out at the National Agronomic Institute of Tunisia under glasshouse conditions. Accordingly, the variation of the soilless cultivation systems effects was determined by measuring and evaluating plant growth, biomass production and photosynthetic performance of basil. Main results showed that plant height (25.69 ± 2.87 cm/plant), length of internodes (2.47 ± 0.17 cm/plant) and leaves number (10.89 ± 1.02 leaves/plant), fresh and dry weight of shoots (9.17 ± 0.49 g and 1.03 ± 0.05 g, respectively) and roots (5.22 ± 0.14 g and 0.37 ± 0.03 g, respectively) were significantly higher in aquaponically grown plants in comparison to hydroponics. However, no significant differences were noted between aquaponics and hydroponics regarding the shoot and root dry matter contents. In addition, the content of chlorophyll a (44.59 ± 3.42 µg∙mg-1 FW) and the efficiency of the photosystem II (Fv/Fm) (0.83 ± 0.01) were significantly higher in basil grown in aquaponics when compared to the hydroponic system. Overall, these findings indicate that aquaponics seems to be more suitable for growing basil plants than the hydroponic system.