IntroductionThe genus Fritillaria (Liliaceae) is an important geophytic taxon with more than 100 species and wide distribution in different climatic zones ranging from southern Europe to the Middle East (Le Nard and De Hertogh, 1993), including Turkey (Bryan, 2002). In Turkey, there are 35 species representing 48 taxa of Fritillaria, and it is ranked 4th after Allium, Iris, and Crocus. Most of the Fritillaria species in Turkey are endemic. The plants flower during spring and are widely accepted as ornamental plants due to their attractive flowers (Le Nard and De Hertogh, 1993). Besides that, the Fritillaria species are used as medicinal plants (Rønsted et al., 2005;Wang et al., 2005) in traditional Chinese medicine (Li et al., 2001) due to a wide array of alkaloids with interesting phytochemical properties.Persian lily (Fritillaria persica) is found mainly in Hatay, Mersin, and Adıyaman provinces of Turkey, as well as in Lebanon, Jordan, and Iran at 700 m to 2800 m above sea level. The bulbs are 3-5 cm in diameter with 2-3 succulent leaves. The plant has 10-25 leaves, which are approximately 15 cm long and 3 cm wide. It bears 7-20 purple bell-shaped flowers, growing in racemose position. The plant can grow up to 20-60 cm in height (Ulug et al., 2010).Conventional plant production methods currently used for the Fritillaria species are seed or bulb propagation. These propagation techniques have certain disadvantages such as very low or unpredictable germination of seeds due to physiological dormancy (Baskin and Baskin, 2004), with weak seedlings, low survival rate, and slow growth, which may take 3-4 years for bulblet maturation (Le Nard and De Hertogh, 1993). Apart from this, a limited availability of bulblets from nature (Subotić et al., 2010) also makes it difficult to get sufficient material to propagate these ornamental species. These limitations suggest the need to develop alternative propagation methods (Ulug et al., 2010) for commercial production of these valuable species.A number of regeneration protocols have been reported for different Fritillaria species by