| Sustaining the increasing global population poses a daunting challenge. As food demands increase, we need to produce better plants while consuming fewer resources. The "producing more with less" dilemma makes this problem very hard to address. Fortunately, over the last several decades, scientists have been developing elite varieties of plants that are higher yielding, drought tolerant, and resistant to pathogens. The discovery and generation of these elite varieties are only a part of the solution. Producing these superior plants at the scale needed to meet the growing demand also presents another challenge. The processes of plant propagation have some inherent problems: The process is long and laborious; the end product is of low monetary value; and traditional methods could give rise to genetic heterogeneity, which results in loss of desired plant characteristics.;To deal with these obstacles, new micropropagation techniques have been developed to make plant propagation more efficient. However, these techniques are not universal for all plant species and require a considerable amount of time to develop. In some cases, the method has to be optimized for different genotypes of the same species. These techniques can also result in a decrease in plant quality, particularly, poor development which leads to low conversion rates. This dissertation will suggest a novel genetic approach to improve plant propagation by understanding the important factors that control plant production and development. To test this strategy, Theobroma cacao (the tree that gives us chocolate) was used as a plant model. Finally, from an engineering point of view, a novel bioreactor design was developed as a way to make the process more efficient by increasing yield/quality and lowering costs by automation and scale-up. |
