Plant Tissue Culture

Traditionally, farmers breed crops over many generations to produce desired qualities, such as higher yields, larger seeds, sweeter fruit, and greater disease resistance. New crop varieties can be created by grafting or cross-pollinating the parent plants. However, these methods are time-consuming and non-specific, with a high chance of eliminating desired traits. 

Alternatively, the use of in vitro techniques known as plant tissue culture can rapidly produce large numbers of plant clones with desired qualities.

This technique relies on ‘totipotency’, which means that a part of a plant can give rise to an entire plant when provided with the appropriate growth regulators and environment. 

Depending on the source of the plant part, or explant, tissue culture techniques can be distinguished into several types.

For example, in callus culture, the tissue explants placed on growth medium undergo rapid cell division and form a mass of undifferentiated cells called a callus.

Plant hormones, such as auxins and cytokinins, regulate several aspects of plant growth and help the callus differentiate into different plant parts. Shoots can be induced from a callus with a high concentration of cyt