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Phoenix dactylifera commonly known as Date Palm is an edible sweet fruit. In cultivation of date palm, the major problem for farmers is to identify the sex of saplings at an early stage so that they can cultivate in their orchards a sufficiently large number of productive female trees with only a minimal number of male trees. This is because; the fruit is borne by female plants only which cannot be identified upto four to five years till the date palm trees bloom for the first time. There have been attempts in the past to identify the sex of the date palm at an early stage and the results have remained frustratingly unsuccessful. For last few years, there have been serious efforts to understand the genetic basis of sex determination in plants and to develop methods to identify sex at an early stage by using molecular marker tools.
In this context recently, Ms Charu Mishra, a PhD scholar of the Department of Biotechnology & Molecular Biology (BMB), Haryana Agricultural University (HAU) has developed a technique to identify the sex of date-palm plants at the nursery stage. The technique is the Polymerase chain reaction based SCAR marker. This technique can identify the sex of date-palm even when the plants were in nursery stage. The ratios of male and female plants of date palm, which emerge after seedling, are almost equal. Identification of sex at seedling stage would help the date palm growers to remove the unwanted male plants as one male plant was sufficient to pollinate 50-60 female plants in the orchard. This is for the first time that such a technology has been developed to identify the sex of date palm plants. An application had been filed for patenting this diagnostic technique by the University.