Design and Evaluation of a Smart Ex Vitro Acclimatization System for Tissue Culture Plantlets

Abstract

One of the technological advancements in agricultural production is the tissue culture propagation technique, commonly used for mass multiplication and disease-free plants. The necessity for date palm tissue culture emerged from the inability of traditional propagation methods’ offshoots to meet the immediate demands for significant amounts of planting material for commercial cultivars. Tissue culture plantlets are produced in a protected aseptic in vitro environment where all growth variables are strictly controlled. The challenges occur when these plantlets are transferred to an ex vitro climate for acclimatization. Traditional glasshouses are frequently used; however, this has substantial mortality consequences. In the present study, a novel IoT-based automated ex vitro acclimatization system (E-VAS) was designed and evaluated for the acclimatization of date palm plantlets (cv. Khalas) to enhance their morpho-physiological attributes and reduce the mortality rate and the contamination risk through minimal human contact. The experimental findings showed that the morpho-physiological parameters of 6- and 12-month-old plants were higher when acclimatized in the prototype E-VAS compared to the traditional glasshouse acclimatization system (TGAS). The maximum plant mortality percentage occurred within the first month of the transfer from the in vitro to ex vitro environment in both systems, which gradually declined up to six months; after that, no significant plant mortality was observed. About 6% mortality was recorded in E-VAS, whereas 18% in TGAS within the first month of acclimatization. After six months of study, an overall 14% mortality was recorded in E-VAS compared to 41% in TGAS. The proposed automated system has a significant potential to address the growing demand for the rapid multiplication of tissue culture-produced planting materials since the plant survival rate and phenotype quality were much higher in E-VAS than in the conventional manual system that the present industry follows for commercial production.

Developing Machine Learning-Based Intelligent Control System for Performance Optimization of Solar PV-Powered Refrigerators

“…Also, the surrounding wind speed affected the PV panel temperature and its conversion efficiency. These results are in agreement with [29,38].…”

“…The calibrated light intensity sensor module (FUT3101, Ke Zhi You Technology Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, China) was used to collect data on solar irradiance. The current intensity sensors (Load CellX03 with HX711 amplifier, Shenzhen Ke Zhi You Technology Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, Guangdong, China) were calibrated by the second author of the current study [12,29,30]. The main microcontroller was an Arduino Mega board (Microchip ATmega328P, Microchip Technology IncW Chandler Blvd, Chandler, AZ, USA) used to receive and process data and send the control signals to the variable speed drives and the refrigerator devices relays.…”

Applications of AI and IoT for Advancing Date Palm Cultivation in Saudi Arabia

“…Date production and trading help local economies and serve as a source of revenue for farmers and exporters. Over the past few decades, Saudi Arabia's agricultural sector, particularly the date palm sector, has experienced tremendous growth and support [39][40][41][42][43].…”

“…In general, date palm farming could benefit from AI and IoT technology by increasing productivity, enhancing quality assurance, and giving farmers more market access. The economic benefits of these technologies are expected to significantly increase as they develop and become more accessible [19,20,30,32,38,43,[142][143][144].…”

Effect of different Potting Mixtures on Acclimatization of In vitro Developed Plants on Survival Percentage under Glass House Condition

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