Vol.:(0123456789) In Vitro Cellular & Developmental Biology - Plant https://doi.org/10.1007/s11627-024-10411-6 PLANT TISSUE CULTURE In vivo regeneration efciency of enset (Ensete ventricosum (Welw.) Cheesman) using indigenous shoot induction method developed in Ethiopia Bizuayehu Tesfaye 1  · Bewuketu Haile 2 Received: 2 November 2023 / Accepted: 6 January 2024 / Editor: Yurong Chen © The Society for In Vitro Biology 2024 Abstract Enset (Ensete ventricosum [Welw.] Cheesman) is native to Ethiopia, valued for its versatility and drought tolerance. Farmers have developed a vegetative method for regenerating multiple shoots that produce plantlets derived from wound callus, a process similar to shoot production in in vitro tissue culture. This in vivo regeneration method, however, is a low-cost, tissue culture-free technique that is executed in a feld context. The objectives of this study were to investigate the efciency of in vivo regeneration in diferent enset landraces using the indigenous method of shoot induction and to compare the capability of wild and domesticated enset landraces to regenerate shoots. Three corm treatments (whole, halved, and quartered) from wild and from three domesticated landraces (Gudiro, Bosso, and Yekko), each of which corm or corm pieces with the apical meristem was removed, were buried in a randomized complete block design with three replicates. The study demonstrated that enset plants can be easily propagated via mechanical cuttings of their corms, giving rise to plantlets deriving from wound callus. This can be done in soil; for example, it is not necessary to use costly in vitro techniques. All domesticated enset landraces showed 100% regeneration frequency in every condition of corm treatment employed and produced an average of 51 to 501 shoots per corm depending on landraces and corm treatments used. In wild enset, 50 to 95% regeneration and an average of 6 to 85 shoots per corm were noted depending on the corm treatments. In general, the regeneration capacity of enset was strongly infuenced by the landrace and corm treatment. Splitting the corm has remarkably enhanced shoot induc- tion efciency in every enset landrace including in wild enset: the more pieces the corm was split into, the more sprouts per corm. Furthermore, this study revealed that domesticated enset has a signifcantly higher capacity for shoot regeneration compared to wild enset, which could provide some insights into the evolution of this clonal crop. Clonal propagation likely conditioned the pathways of enset evolution under domestication. Keywords Enset · In vivo regeneration · Callus · Adventitious shoot induction · Vegetative propagation Introduction Enset, Ensete ventricosum (Welw.) Cheesman, is a perennial herb in the Musaceae family (Cheesman 1947). It is a diploid plant with a chromosome count of 2n = 18. Enset resembles bananas in terms of its morphology and is a vital source of starch for approximately 20 million people in southern and southwestern Ethiopia (Borrell et al. 2019). When it comes to edible dry weight and energy content, enset outperforms all other crops in Ethiopia in terms of yield (Tsegaye and Struik 2002). Similar to bananas, enset has a pseudo-stem made up of overlapping leaf sheaths and large paddle-shaped leaves (Borrell et al. 2019). It also produces a large hanging inforescence with fruits that resemble bananas (Yemataw et al. 2018). However, unlike bananas, which are primarily grown for their fruits, enset provides a continuous source of dietary starch throughout the year through its swollen pseudo-stem base, leaf sheaths, and underground corm. The plant is typically harvested before it fowers, which usually occurs 4 to 7 yr after planting. It may take over 10 yr for enset to complete its life cycle (Tesfaye and Ludders 2002; Editor: Yurong Chen. * Bewuketu Haile bewuketu@gmail.com 1 School of Plant and Horticulture Science, Hawassa University, P.O. Box 05, Hawassa, Ethiopia 2 Department of Horticulture, Mizan-Tepi University, P. O. Box 260, Mizan-Aman, Ethiopia