Tissue culture and regeneration of plants is considerably easier than for animals. This is largely due to the greater developmental plasticity of plant tissues and the phenomenon totipotency.
Plant tissue culture has been an integral part of the successful development of plant transformation technology, which has allowed the creation of transgenic plants by introducing DNA.
The technologies have been employed in order to bring about an improvement in the existing varieties and also create new improved plant lines.
Advances in tissue cultures is essential to realizing the potential of biotechnology in agriculture.
Micropropagation has the immerse advantage of rapidly generating a large number of genetically identical plants in a much shorter time than could be achieved by conventional propagation methods.
The breakthroughs with recombinant DNA technology using bacteria has spawned tremendous interest in directly incorporating specific genes into plants using r-DNA techniques.
It has particularly important application for genetic modification, where a novel transgenic plant can be rapidly multiplied.
As the name indicates, plant tissue culture involves excising plant tissues and growing them on nutrient media. Tissue culture begins in a laboratory, which consist of a media preparation room, a transfer room and culture growing room.
The plants are started in the tiniest of greenhouses – a test tube – in a sterilized growing medium consisting mainly of agar, fertilizer elements, vitamins and growth regulator.
Tissue culture in agriculture
