"In a context of increasing wood demand from the forest industry worldwide, maritime pine (Pinus pinaster) breeding programs have been putting their focus on wood traits, resilience to abiotic stresses and to biotic agents. Ultimately, one of the main goals is to produce large numbers of clonal trees from the ones selected with the improved traits. Currently, the clonal propagation of the genotypes selected in breeding programs is already being applied to several forest tree species for commercial purposes, namely by using a type of vegetative propagation technology called somatic embryogenesis. P. pinaster is not yet among the forest tree species which have been successfully clonally propagated on a large commercial scale by somatic embryogenesis.(...)
