Restoring this pathway might, in fact, represent a more effective therapeutic strategy with respect to directly altering BDNF or IGF-1 levels. Modern forest management relies extensively on breeding and reforestation programs to support both the sustainability of forest productivity and conservation of natural forests, with the expectation that plantation forestry will play a major role. As such, vegetative propagation has become an integral part of many tree improvement programs, primarily due to its ability to clonally propagate elite genotypes. This is indicative of the widely held belief that cloning individual trees allows large genetic gains to be achieved within a single selection cycle, and of interest in developing the capability to clone adult trees because many elite characteristics only become established after sexual maturation. Although juvenile conifer trees can be cloned through rooted IPI-493 cuttings, as trees mature they become increasingly unresponsive. Indeed, loss of juvenility in conifers is particularly persistent and difficult to reverse. Nevertheless, a number of reports have described successful production of propagules from adult conifers using vegetative propagation. However, vegetative propagation through rooting of shoots presents many limitations, the most prominent being the limited number of propagules that can be generated for reforestation programs, which have historically relied on large-scale production of conifer seedlings from seed. LDN-193189 hydrochloride Somatic embryogenesis provides an alternative approach that is in many ways analogous to large-scale seedling production from seed. In addition to allowing the exploitation of existing reforestation infrastructure, SE provides the capability for large-scale clonal propagation, in that somatic embryos produced from an individual EM line are genetically identical. Combined with the ability to cryopreserve vast numbers of EM lines, SE has the potential to generate an unlimited numbers of somatic seedlings, albeit with one major limitation. Not with standing the potential of SE for clonal propagation, the recalcitrance of vegetative explants to generate EM has precluded the ability to clone individual trees.