Plant Tissue Culture

“Tissue culture is the technique of growing cells and tissues in an artificial medium separate from the organism.”

What is Tissue Culture?

Tissue culture is a technique in which fragments of plants are cultured and grown in a laboratory. Many times the organs are also used for tissue culture. The media used for the growth of the culture is broth and agar.

This technique is also known as micropropagation. It has proved beneficial for the production of disease-free plants and increase plant yield in developing countries. It only requires a sterile workplace, greenhouse, trained manpower, and a nursery.

Oil palm, banana, eggplant, pineapple, rubber tree, tomato, sweet potato have been produced by tissue culture in the developing countries.

Plant tissue culture was a new addition to the methods of plant breeding that developed around the 1950s. Since the conventional breeding techniques could not fulfil the required demand of crops, tissue culture came around as a grand leap in breeding practices. It makes use of parts of a plant to generate multiple copies of the plant in a very short duration. The technique exploits the property of totipotency of plant cell which means that any cell from any part of the plant can be used to generate a whole new plant.

Uses of Plant tissue culture

Tissue culture is used to develop thousands of genetically identical plants from one single parent plant known as somaclones, and this process is known as micropropagation. The method offers an advantage over other methods as it can be used to develop disease free plants from disease-rode plants by using their meristems (apical and axillary) as explants.

Since this method produces new plantlets by the score of thousands, it has been used extensively for the production of commercially important plants including food plants like tomato, banana, apple etc. The most notable example of the application of micropropagation was observed in the farming of orchids as it rose exponentially due to the availability of millions of plantlets due to tissue culture methods.

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