Anyone interested in this?  There are many sites that talk about how to do it.  Agristarts does figs but they have a minimum of 1,000 plants per month.  Some of the places will do a minimum of 500 plants and the price can be as low as $5/plant.  I bet the FMV free black ischia would get 500 requests  :)

Currently, our good F4F/FF is 1600+ member strong! (thanks to Jon).
I would not mind spending a few bucks for a well behaved Ischia Black...

Ditto George!

Count me in if they will do it, just need it to come to Canada and if  they are only going to charge 18$ per 72 cell tray I will buy a tray.

I would guess that 1,600 number is extremely misleading. It would include everyone who passed by the previous 5 years, joined, never or rarely posted, and are long gone. Also spammers, and various internet bots. The number of active members would be a fraction of that. But there might be many who would want more than 1 healthy IB. :)

As to a healthy IB, count me in. I have a couple nice-looking started cuttings from Jon that are doing well, but ya never know how they will do over the years.

I would take several, at a good price.

Count me in.

Id buy 100 of them. eBay millionaire!

Bob, I think you could end up with enough people.

luke

If the price is right then you can count me in. I'd be interested in getting some FMV free trees.

Two things to consider. Someone most likely would have to front the money. Second, I'm not sure there are gaurantees that disease free plants would be produced - that would need to be further investigated.

I am interested, but not in a position to front money. 

I believe the cautionary notes about whether we'd get disease free trees, but the experiment sounds interesting enough that I'd participate and contribute. (But like Barry, I'm not in a position to provide a large sum up front... I'd contribute though).

Is Ischia Black the only one being considered?

Mike   central NY state, zone 5

The idea isn't to produce disease free plants.  A clone will have all the DNA & RNA of the part cloned.  Since it's the cells of the original plant dividing everything from the original plant is part of the clone.  That means viruses come along for the ride.  I may be able to treat with an antiviral but that would only stop the virus from reproducing 1000s of copies of itself in each cell as the clones grow.  As soon as the anti-viral is stopped (when the plant outgrows a 4-6 oz jar) the virus will resume its normal activity.   

The idea is to provide plants to people who want them.  Looks like I'm going to get set up to do it myself.  If someone wants 20 or 50 copies of their $200 plant I'll promise not to sell it but I get 1 for me  :)  All 20 probably wont go for $200 each but it isn't outrageous to think you could get $2,000 for all 20.  After that it might become a commodity but that's better than just $200 every 6 months for a few years after which it becomes a commodity anyway.  It's not likely I could produce the plants for $5 each but the price shouldn't be horrific.   Since I'm new at this there wouldn't be any payment until plants were ready to ship.

The diseases they get rid of are generally bacterial and fungal. The advantage of micropropagation is to take, for example, 1 leaf or a piece of stem and get 2 dozen plants or 1 growing tip and get 20 to 5000 plants per month. I don't know if anyone's perfected a leaf protocol for figs yet. It's useful for young, slow growing plants where you can't get a lot of cutting material. If you have a 30 foot tall desert king cuttings are probably the way to go. :)

If you do a search for "virus elimination through meristem culture" a good number of papers turn up. To be honest, I'm not interested enough to read them. If it is done in other species, it probably is not out of the realm of possibility for figs. But if someone hasn't been doing it (meristem culture of figs to produce disease free plants) prior to now, the cost probably would be far greater than $2,500. Just a guess.

If, however, leaf or lower stem tissue were used for cell propagation/cloning, any plants produced would have the diseases of the parent plant. I could be wrong, but if that were the case, I doubt you'd get the same numbers of people interested in buying them.

By extracting the meristem when it "first emerges"
thats the best shot of trying to produce a fmv free fig plant and its been done in studies.
Even that is not 100% foolproof iv'e read.

Tissue culture, cloning etc done to mass produce plants for market in short time and is most likely to carry over the virus iv'e read some years back.

Again im just a grower.

Let's say a lab successfully produced fig plants with no FMV, as soon as someone took these plants into their home nursery, the plants would be exposed to the FMV again.  You would virtually need a sterile environment to guarantee the disease wouldn't be transmitted to virgin plants.

How many people are ready to burn every tree they currently have?

udaman if indeed that were to happen i could grow such a fmv free plant to 4-6 feet and give it the start its needed afterward i would not worry about fmv for it would have is established start unlike a ucdavis stunted ischia black plant that never grows.

Ahh, so the FMV is only a problem when trying to get a tree started, not so much afterward.  But then if you were to make cuttings of that tree, you would then be back to the same problem?  So the only way to propagate the IB is from cloning.  It doesn't sound economically viable.

Orchidists have been doing it for years and no one lets his home-grown risk of exposure to virus stop him from indulging.

We could all "front" the money, just agree on someone who would aggregate our contributions in escrow until there was enough to make the transaction.

Bob:

If you take on this venture and are concerned about getting the plant clean, get it in writing that they will thermo-treat and test the plants to verify that they've cleaned the plant from ALL forms of FMV. This may cost you though.  From what I've read there can be a combination of up to 4 different viruses that combine in different combinations to make up the FMV? They would have to have the serums to test for all of these?  On the other hand maybe you just want to multiply the plant "as is" which can easily be done as it is with the TC plants listed on Ebay via Florida Hill for example.

I've dealt with Agristarts before.  They have alot of irons in the fire so to speak and this could take a few years.  They give big nurseries the most attention.   They want to hear that you will order several 1000 per month or they are not going to take you seriously.  I think they will cause you more frustration that what it's worth but I would be happy to give you a hand though.  I don't want to sound pesimistic, but if I'm wrong, I'm in with you. 

Novel, but my entire collection is infected and would just re-infect these again :(

If the plant minimum is 1000 could 4 different figs at 250 plants each be produced or is it only 1000 of each kind?  I would be willing to contribute. Do they supply the stock plant or do we?  Do they gene test prior to reproduction to make sure they have the right thing or would we have to pay for that.
Thanks,
Eric