Since long lived plants may develop
mutants even in apical meristem
(Klekowski 1985) and during the last few
years, variations have been detected among
in vitro date palm cultivars Barhi, Medjool
and Khalas such as Dwarfism, delay in
fruiting and fruiting set failure (McCubbin
et al. 2004, Al-Kaabi et al. 2005). All these
cases would greatly affect the utilization of
tissue culture techniques. Various
techniques were used to confirm the true to
typeness produced in vitro. Among the
different techniques used in generating
molecular markers, for direct detection of
genomic variation at DNA level, Random
Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD)
markers have been successfully used for the
cultivar analysis and species identification
in most plants, due to the technical
simplicity and speed of the methodology
(Bader et al. 2007, Al-Khalifah and Askari
2007