Electrofusion of Plant Protoplasts: Selection and Screening for Somatic Hybrids of Nicotiana

Discoveries in the 1960s and 1970s showed that plant protoplasts could be freed from their walls by digestion with fungal enzymes (), grown in culture, and regenerated back into intact plants (). This work opened the way for protoplast fusion and somatic hybridization in plants (). In the ensuing 20 years, there have been substantial improvements in protoplast fusion and culture, and sophisticated approaches for the selection and characterization of somatic hybrids have been developed. As a result, in the 1990s, protoplast fusion has come of age, and fusion-derived somatic hybrids are being evaluated in practical plant breeding programs (, , .