Tissue Culture Plants

Tissue Culture Plants

News: The Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA) recently conducted a webinar on ‘Export Promotion of Tissue Culture Plants such as Foliage, Live Plants, Cut Flowers, and Planting Material’.

About Plant Tissue Culture:
• It is the production of new plants from a small piece of plant tissue or cells removed from the growing tips of a plant in a suitable growth medium.
• In this process the growth medium or culture solution is very important as it is used for growing plant tissue because it contains various plant nutrients in the form of ‘jelly’ known as agar and plant hormones which are necessary for the growth of plants.

Where can it be put to use?
• To study the various plant diseases and work out methods for their elimination.
• Single cell clones are useful for genetic, morphological and pathological studies.
• Embryonic cell suspensions can be used for large scale clonal propagation.
• To study the respiration and metabolism of plants.
• Mutant cells can be selected from cultures and used for crop improvement.
• Immature embryos can be cultured in vitro to produce hybrids, a process referred to as embryo rescue.

Advantages:
• Quickly produce mature plants.
• Allows them to be moved with greatly reduced chances of transmitting diseases, pests, and pathogens.
• Storage of genetic plant material to safeguard native plant species.

Issues faced by Tissue culture plant laboratories:
• Increasing power costs.
• Low efficiency levels of the skilled workforce in the laboratories.
• Contamination issues in the laboratories.
• Cost of transportation of micro-propagated planting material.
• Lack of harmonization in the HS code of Indian planting material with other nations.
• Objections raised by the forest and quarantine departments to the export of live planting material.

Efforts made by Government to encourage exports:
• APEDA is running a Financial Assistance Scheme (FAS) to help laboratories upgrade themselves so as to produce export quality tissue culture planting material.
• It also facilitates exports of tissue culture planting material to diversified countries through market development, market analysis and promotion and exhibition of tissue culture plants at international exhibitions and by participating in buyer-seller meets at different international forums.