Plant Tissue Culture Can Be Successful at Home!
Plant Tissue Culture can be done at home in a kitchen or hobby environment. Plant Tissue Culture is the process of culturing and growing plants in a sterile container. Tissue culture has become a major income tool for nurseries and hobbyists plant propagation projects. Growers like Plant Tissue Culture because it saves floor space, is compact, and is very efficient in the production of plants.
The process of Plant Tissue Culture preserves a plant’s genetic material like cuttings do which lets us know what the new plants are going to look like. There are a few rare exceptions but there are exceptions to every rule. Growing from seed gives a genetic variance especially with cultivars and sports. Seeds from species level plants can be Plant Tissue Cultured, too!
Plant Tissue Culture is an important method by which all sorts of varieties of plants can be produced and sent to market quickly. African violets, Philodendron, Monstera, carnivorous plants, aquarium plants, and many others can be successfully tissue cultured with the proper tissue culture techniques. This is an ideal way to propagate your favorite plant species all year long without having to wait for warm weather. Whether you live in Austin, Texas or Sydney, Australia you can practice Plant Tissue Culture at Home!
Many plant species can be tissue cultured at home like African Violets and Monstera.
A Plant Tissue Culture lab can be set up at home with relatively little cost. Get started producing thousands of plants with a plastic storage bin and a pressure cooker. You don’t have to buy an expensive Laminar Flow Hood and Autoclave. This only requires growing areas with lighting, and somewhat steady room temperatures. These are not hard conditions to meet in an average household. You don’t even need a greenhouse if you don’t have space.
Home based plant tissue culture can be economical and easier than you think.
Plant material can be sterilized with diluted bleach solution and placed into growing medium for various stages of growth. This medium has gelling agents, carbohydrates, and the necessary basic ingredients needed by plants (nutrients), including amino acids, vitamins, and minerals.
Agar agar is a gelatinous substance that provides physical support for seedlings and shoots. Agar is added to the medium and heated up to set the gelling agent. Aquatic plants like cryptocoryne and aquarium stem plants may not need agar for support and a liquid media will suffice for those specimens.
The culture vessels are loaded with the heated nutrient and agar medium. Then the vessels are autoclaved in the pressure cooker to make them sterile. The growth medium will be sterile inside so that new clones or perhaps the bud you used will remain sterile. Baby food jars are a commonly used container to use for micropropagation.
Donor plant material can be a shoot tip, root tip, node, or even seeds.
You can use donor plant material, called an explant, you have gathered for Home Based Plant Tissue Culture. It is sterlized and put in a sterile growing environment with forceps. After it is sterilized it can be rinsed with sterile water but there are other ways to reduce the workload and increase successful initiation of your new plant material. This initiated plant material is what will create new shoots with the help of plant growth regulators in the tissue culture medium.
After the explant has been successfully put into initiation media and is free of contamination for some time it can be put into multiplication stage or callus stage. This is called replating. Replating can be carried out exponentially when enough shoots have been generated. The old culture media is disposed of and when there are enough plants going through the multiplication stage some can be moved on to the rooting process.
Rooting Plantlets Coming From Tissue Culture.
Plantlets coming out of plant tissue culture can be rooted several ways. Plant Tissue Culture: A Home Based Guide goes over various ways to root your cuttings coming out of plant tissue culture. Rooting and acclimating your tissue cultured plants can often be done without using a rooting stage in plant tissue culture. Rooting aroids like Monstera and philodendron as well as many others can be done rather easily without a plant tissue culture setup at all. Many plant hobbyists buy TC plants from a supplier and want to root and acclimate their plants. The book goes over the methods successfully used to root plantlets from tissue culture without a lab.
Home based plant tissue culture is easier than you might think. Get started today!
Home Based Plant Tissue Culture has been around for quite some time and still remains one of the most cost effective ways for producing large numbers of home grown plants. Anyone that can bake a cake should be able to practice plant tissue culture successfully. Grab a copy of Plant Tissue Culture: A Home Based Guide from Amazon.com and get started on your path to propagating more plants than with any other method.