That painstaking process involves a two-phase trial and testing program lasting up to 5 years. The first phase, known as "Line Development", allows us to identify the genetically elite lines.

The second phase, known as "Pilot Production," allows us to optimize the delivery process before we commit resources to large-scale seed production and deployment of the ultimate seeds.

The Line 

When used in the context of plant propagation, the term refers to a collection of plants produced asexually either from a single plant or part of a plant. They have the exact same genetic make-up.

Development Stage.
During this first phase, our goal is to establish Embryogenic cultures 

A plant cell or tissue culture capable of forming Somatic Embryos  A plant embryo formed in vitro from vegetative (somatic) cells by mitotic division of cells.  CLICK FOR MORE and regenerating plants via somatic embryogenesis.

that can sustain production of the embryos that have been selected from the most desirable families.

Relying on our in-house breeding and our customer's tree-breeding specialists, we isolate the most desirable families (e.g. usually derived from control pollination of selected parents). Our experts then use immature cones from these select families to establish embryogenic cultures in the lab.

Within 12-18 months, somatic embryos generated from these cultures are germinated as miniplugs or in vitro seedlings, which are then shipped back to the customer to be grown into full-size seedlings for field trials. These field trials allow the growth of each line to be assessed and allow the top performing lines to be selected at various stages. Typically, an initial selection of lines is made after 2-3 years of field growth. The final selection, however, takes place after 4-5 years. After that point, additional refinements can still be made at any age.

Each cycle begins with the establishment of 25-50 lines from each of 10-15 families, with the resulting test involving approximately 500 lines. In order to generate reliable test results, it's usually necessary to plant about ten seedlings from each line at each field site. In order to cover all relevant soil and climatic conditions, three to five sites are usually used for these trials in order to cover the full range of conditions within the forest estate.

The specific design of the line development and testing program will depend on a number of factors, including the range of pedigreed material available for testing, as well as the desired levels of improvements and the specific traits that are being selected for. Depending on the circumstances, as many as a thousand lines might be tested, with only the top performing 5% of these lines being used for operational deployment.

That said, CellFor can also shorten this testing period by providing lines that have already been developed within our existing programs.

1. This stage allows us to evaluate somatic seedlings under operational nursery and field conditions.
2. It's an opportunity to test and optimize delivery of the CellFor seeds to the customer's specific nursery growing regimes.
3. It allows us to assess the performance of lines as line block plantings on a variety of sites.
4. It provides an opportunity for demonstration plantings for intra-company purposes. This phase is usually carried out at the semi-operational level, and involves about 100,000-500,000 seedlings each year.