Every plant is distinct and diverse, much like every human. Some possess superior color, yield, or resistance to pests. Scientists have been searching for ways to replicate these exceptional people exactly for years.
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Typically, sexual reproduction is how plants create new seeds. In other words, pollen from the plant’s stamens fertilizes the egg cells in the flowers. These sexual cells are all made of DNA, which is genetic material. Unique plants are produced during sexual reproduction when the DNA of both parents is mixed in novel and unanticipated ways.
Plant breeders find this unpredictability problematic since it might take years of meticulous greenhouse effort to produce a plant with desired traits. A lot of people believe that seeds are the source of all plant growth. But today, scientists have created a number of techniques for cultivating perfect replicas of plants devoid of seeds. And they are now using a technique known as “tissue culture” to do this.
Tissue culture: What is it?
The growing of plant cells, tissues, or organs on specially prepared nutritional medium is known as tissue culture, or TC. A single cell may regenerate into a whole plant given the correct circumstances. The technology of plant tissue culture has been used for over thirty years. Tissue culture is seen to be a crucial technique for poor nations since it can quickly produce large numbers of homogeneous plants while also producing high-quality, disease-free planting material.
A kind of tissue culture called micropropagation yields more planting material, making large-scale planting and distribution easier. In this manner, a plant may be quickly multiplied to thousands of duplicates. Compared to traditional propagules, micropropagated plants are reported to establish faster, grow taller and more aggressively, have a shorter and more consistent production cycle, and yield larger quantities.
Plant tissue culture is a simple process that has already been mastered in many poor nations. All that is needed for its use is trained labor and a clean work environment, nursery, and green house. Tissue culturing is regrettably time-consuming, labor-intensive, and often expensive. Tissue-culture-grown plants of interest to developing nations include oil palm, plantain, pine, banana, date, eggplant, jojoba, pineapple, cassava, yam, sweet potato, and tomato. In Africa, this is the most widely used use of traditional biotechnology.
TC technology applications in Asia
In order to meet the requirements of orchid species and hybrids that are known to grow well in Southeast Asia, tissue culture has been improved. Based on the experiences of Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia, small producers can earn additional revenue and large foreign cash from the ornamental and cut flower sector.
Tissue culture is used in Thailand to breed orchids that are sensitive to their environment and grow slowly. Southeast Asia’s top producer of tissue culture, Thailand generates 50 million plantlets annually. The majority of these are orchids, which have contributed to the nation becoming the world’s largest exporter of whole and cut orchids.
The technology of micropagation via shoot culture has been developed for the large-scale multiplication of bananas. This is a typical control method for viral illnesses that affect bananas in the Philippines, such banana bunchy top virus (BBTV) and banana bract mosaic virus (BBrMV), which are disseminated by propagative materials.
Positive Aspects of Tissue Culture
1. Tissue culturing is an extremely quick method. A tiny piece of plant tissue can yield thousands of plantlets in a few of weeks.
2. Tissue culture produces disease-free young plants.
3. Regardless of the climate or season, tissue culture may produce plants all year round.
4. Tissue culture requires very little area to create new plants.
5. It facilitates the introduction of new kinds into the market more quickly.
6. This method aids in generating and maintaining virus-free stock in the seed potato industry.
Thus, we now know that tissue culture is a crucial method for introducing novel genes into plants.
The following is the procedure for growing new plants by tissue culture:
1. A little fragment of plant tissue is removed from the tip or growth point of the plant and deposited on a sterile jelly that is loaded with hormones and nutrients for the plant. Hormones cause plant tissue cells to proliferate quickly, generating a large number of cells that combine to create a lump of mass without any structure known as a “callus.”
2. After that, the callus is moved to another jelly that has the right plant hormones in it, which encourage the callus to grow roots.
3. After the callus with roots has formed, it is placed on another jelly that has various hormones that promote the growth of shoots.
4. The callus splits into small plantlets, each with roots and branches. In this manner, a small number of initial plant cells or tissue might give rise to numerous miniature plantlets.
5. After this process, the plantlets are moved into soil or containers so they can develop into fully grown plants.
