Get to know tissue culture techniques

In their efforts to acquire new individuals or reproduce, plants, like other living things, also carry out the process of reproduction. There are several reproductive technologies that can be applied to plants, including plant tissue culture techniques. What is this?

Plant tissue culture is a method that aims to multiply plants by taking a part of the plant, such as a cell or a group of cells, tissues, or organs. This tissue culture technique utilizes the principle of vegetative propagation of plants.

In practice, the previously extracted plant parts are grown in sterile conditions on a medium containing nutrients and growth regulators or hormones. Parts of the plant will be able to multiply and develop into plants that have complete organs, namely roots, stems, and leaves.

In tissue culture techniques, several components are needed such as explants and culture media that contain the nutrients that plants need for their growth. Eksplan is a plant tissue that contains young tissue or tissue that is meristematic only a few millimeters in size which will later be cultured on culture media.

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Examples of tissue commonly used as explants are stem tips, leaf tips, and root tips. Culture media is a place where plant cells grow in the form of agar in a sterile tube and contain the nutrients that plants need. Some examples of plants that have been used as objects for culture are mango, sugar cane, banana and orchid.

There are several advantages of developing plant tissue cultures, including:

  • In a short time you can produce the required plant seeds in large quantities.
  • The nature of the plants produced is in accordance with the characteristics of the parent plant being cultured.
  • Can be bred without waiting for the plant to mature.
  • No large area is needed to grow plant seeds.
  • Plants produced by tissue culture produce faster.