Resumen en inglés

The Citrus genus belongs to an important group of crops in the national and regional market that are used at an industrial level in a number of commercial products with high demand; Lately, in Colombia and especially in the department of Córdoba there has been a low production and therefore low commercialization of citrus fruits due to the presence of various pests that attack and affect these crops, many of them putting plant health at risk throughout the national territory such as Huanglongbing (HLB) which is produced by the bacterium Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus using the insect Diaphorina citri as a vector. Due to this, the ICA (Colombian Agricultural Institute) has imposed the Resolution 12816 of August 21, 2019, which obligates nurseries to have a special infrastructure within their facilities in order to avoid contact of mother plants with insects vectors of diseases, but this generates a large economic investment to adapt all the necessary facilities to meet the requirements and be able to produce plant material. For these reasons, in Córdoba there are only two ICA-certified nurseries to market citrus, and nonnursery is certified to produce plants of this species. The IBAC (Institute of Applied Biotechnology of the Caribbean), in the search for technological alternatives to overcome these limitations, has evaluated the use of alternative methods of grafting through mini-grafts, considering as its main objective to evaluate the growth and development in the field phase of Tahiti lime (Citrus x latifolia Tanaka ex Q. Jiménez) and Valencia orange (Citrus x sinensis Osbeck) plants produced by two types of mini grafts. This research was carried out on the main campus of the University of Córdoba in a period of four months, the plant material consisted of plants propagated by mini slit grafts and inverted-T on rootstocks of Cleopatra mandarin (Citrus x reshni Hort. ex Tanaka), the evaluated variables corresponded to the number of branches per plant (1) and the height of these (2) measured every 20 days. The treatments were distributed using a completely randomized design (DCA) with a 2 x 2 x 2 factorial arrangement with 3 replicates. The first factor corresponded to the species, the second to the type of mini graft and the third to the type of container in the nursery. An analysis of variance (ANAVA) was carried out, which detected statistical differences in the variable number of branches, where Lima Tahiti produced a greater number than Valencia orange. In the height variable, there was a significant effect of species, type of mini graft, type of container, and in the species x container interaction, also observing statistical differences in the treatments of the factorial experiment vs controls for which the Dunnett test was performed at 5%.