152 Conservation news


Use of plant tissue culture to conserve the Critically Endangered Petrocosmeagrandiflorain China


Manglietia ventii blooming in Kunming Botanical Garden.


and is endemic to Yunnan, China. It was categorized as Endangered on the IUCN Red List in 2012 and the China Red List of Biodiversity–Higher Plants in 2020, and listed as a second-ranked National Key Protected Wild Plant of China in 1999 and 2021, and by the Yunnan provincial gov- ernment as a Plant Specieswith Extremely Small Populations in 2009.On 6 September 2023, in Kunming Botanical Garden in Yunnan, the ex situ population of 28 individuals, planted in 2015, bloomed for the first time. The seedlings of M. ventii used to establish this ex situ population were propagated from wild-collected seeds. In 2015, the diameter of the planted seedlings at ground level was 1.2–1.4 cm. In 2019, average plant height was 3.8 mand average ground diameter 7.3 cm, and in 2023 these measure- ments were 8.3 mand 15.0 cm, respectively. Although the seedlings experienced frost damage, M. ventii has grown well and has adapted to the Botanical Garden’s weather conditions. In situ conservation of M. ventii has included reinforcement and reintroduction of populations and estab- lishment of mini-reserves, and as a result of these integrated conservation efforts M. ventii was not included in the 2021 list of Yunnan protected Plant Species with Extremely Small Populations. In the wild, M. ventii blooms during April–May. This


blooming in Kunming Botanical Garden in September suggests that studies of the species’ conservation genomics and ex situ conservation biology are required.


LINGYUN TANG1,LEI CAI2 andWEIBANG SUN1,2 (wbsun@mail.


kib.ac.cn) 1Kunming Botanical Garden, Kunming Institute of Botany,


Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yunnan, China. 2Yunnan Key Laboratory for Integrative Conservation of Plant Species with Extremely Small Populations, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yunnan, China


This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC BY 4.0.


(a) Petrocosmea grandiflora flowering in the wild; (b) adventitious shoot formation induced from one leaf explant; (c) somatic embryogenesis from one leaf explant; (d) seedlings growing on medium; (e) regenerated plantlets 3 months after transplanting.


Oryx, 2024, 58(2), 145–154 © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605324000061


Petrocosmea grandiflora Hemsl. (Gesneriaceae) is a peren- nial herb endemic to China with large and beautiful bluish violet flowers of potential horticultural value. The first spe- cimen of this species was collected in 1893 by British botanist Hancock in Mengzi County, Yunnan Province, and it was described by Hemsley in 1895, with the type specimen de- posited at the Herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK. For 121 years the species remained unseen until it was rediscovered in the wild in 2016. However, despite multiple field explorations only three populations have so far been found in the wild, with ,1,000 individuals in total. Petrocosmea grandiflora has been categorized as a Yunnan Key Protected Wild Plant, as a Plant Species with Extremely Small Populations in Yunnan Province, and as a Threatened Species of Higher Plants in China, and it should be categorized as Critically Endangered according to the IUCN Red List assessment criteria. During September 2022–December 2023, with the


support of a conservation programme (2021SJ14X-06)of Yunnan Forestry and Grassland Bureau, we successfully established an in vitro regeneration protocol using direct somatic embryogenesis and shoot organogenesis from leaf


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