Plant tissue culture collects techniques used to maintain or grow plant cells, tissues, or organs under sterile conditions on a nutrient culture medium of known composition. It is widely used to produce clones of a plant in a method known as micropropagation.
Various techniques in plant tissue culture can offer certain advantages over conventional methods of propagation, including:
- Precise copies of plants growing especially good flowers, fruits, or other desirable traits.
- Produce mature plants rapidly.
- Production of several plants without seeds or pollinators to grow seeds.
- Regenerating entire plants from genetically-modified plant cells.
- Production of plants in sterile containers allowing them to travel with drastically reduced chances of transmitting diseases, pests, and pathogens.
- Production of seed plants otherwise with meager chances of germination and growth, i.e., orchids and Nepenthes.
- Cleaning particular viral and other infection plants and rapidly multiplying them as 'cleaned stock' for horticulture and agriculture.
- Development of improved varieties
- Disease-free plant growth (virus)
- Transformation of genomes
- Secondary metabolite synthesis
- Varieties tolerant to salinity, drought, and heat stress
Plant tissue culture depends on many plant cells being able to regenerate a whole plant (totipotency). Single cells, plant cells without cell walls (protoplasts), pieces of leaves, stems, or roots may also be used to produce a new plant on crop media due to the nutrients and hormones required.
Plant Tissues, also known as explants, are harvested from selected high yielding varieties or mother plants and are grown in a medium of known composition under sterile conditions.
It is then induced to divide and expand into a full plant. This method allows several new plantlets to be created, unlike the conventional nursery, which is dependent on seed alone.
The T.Y. B.Sc. student filling the MS medium into the glass vial in a laminar hood
Today's farmers worldwide grow banana, potato, cane, apple, pineapple, strawberry, gerbera, anthurium, orchids, bamboo, date palm, teak, and pomegranate with tissue culture.
The fascinating story of how growing plants in the test tube changed the agricultural landscape.
T.Y. B.Sc. student inoculating the maize embryo in aseptic condition
Plant tissue culture collects techniques used to maintain or grow plant cells, tissues, or organs under sterile conditions on a nutrient culture medium of known composition.
Here in this video, one technique of Plant Tissue Culture is explained: maize 🌽 embryo culture.
In this video, you can see how nicely the maze embryo developed into the plumule and radicle.
Maize (Zea mays) is a Monocot seed grows on M. S. MEDIUM in the UG and PG departments of Botany because it's a part of their practice.
I purposely have chosen this technique because we couldn't see the germination of seed. After all, it takes place below the ground; seeing an embryo's development on M. S. Medium is a very pleasurable thing.
History of Plant Tissue Culture Technology
Plant tissue culture research takes root from cell discovery, followed by cell theory propounding. In 1838, Schleiden and Schwann suggested that cell be the fundamental unit of all living organisms. They visualized that cell is capable of autonomy, and therefore if, given an environment, it should be possible for each cell to regenerate into a whole plant. Centered on this idea, Gottlieb Haberlandt, a German physiologist first attempted to cultivate isolated single palisade cells from leaves in knop's salt solution enriched with sucrose in 1902. Cells remained alive for up to a month, increased in size, accumulated starch but failed to divide. Though unsuccessful, he laid the foundation for tissue culture technology for which he is considered the father of plant tissue culture.
