Plant Tissue Culture: Advantages and Applications

Despite the great advancements in science and technology, the foundations of modern civilization are till date dependent on plants, for the basic necessities like food and clothing. Conventional plant breeding, involving human interference in selection of natural resources, has given us the present day improved variety of food crops, cereals, medicinal herbs and other plants. However, breeding results in random selection of parental traits. Genetic transformation must be resorted to in order to ensure that a particular desired character, or genetic trait, definitely gets incorporated in the progeny plants. Using methods of pant tissue culture, selected superior clones of valuable horticulture crops can be rapidly propagated for commercial production. Thus, plant tissue culture now has direct commercial applications as well as value in basic research into cell biology, genetics and biochemistry. Applications include:

screening programs of plant cells for advantageous characters,

extensive cultivation of plant cells in liquid culture for the production of secondary products, like recombinant proteins that are frequently used as biopharmaceuticals,

as an instrument for transformation, followed by either immediate testing of genetic constructs or regeneration of transgenic plants,

elimination of viruses by propagation from meristematic tissues,

crossing distantly related species utilizing techniques like protoplast fusion, and regeneration of the novel hybrid, thereby selecting disease, insect, or stress resistant plants.

The ability to rearrange, and reorganize the constituents of higher plants has been demonstrated with a few model systems to date, e.g. Tobacco (1983), Rice (1996). Restricted exploitation of plant germ-plasm at the cellular echelon by employing plant tissue culture thus facilitate procurement of new and better plant species. Selection and propagation of superior individuals can be tremendously accelerated using in vitro systems. Use of such schemes in tissue culture can endeavor to utilize the natural variability recognized in plants. Or changeability can be brought by chemical or physical agents identified as mutants.

Plant tissues germinated in vitro can be freed from the organization of the whole plant through callus formation. If these assemblages of cells are then subjected to a selection agent, then tolerant ones will stay alive while all the vulnerable ones get killed. This concept can be applied achieve resistance to various fungal and bacterial pathogens and different types of phytotoxic chemical agents. Whole plants can then be reorganized from such resistant cell lines, which would retain the selected resistance. Research in this area may ultimately lead to the generation of herbicide resistant or pathogen resistant or even pathogen-free agronomic crops, and other species of plants. The novel genetic combinations that are to be accomplished through plant tissue culture are all lines of research which can have a profound impact on the nursery industry and in the production of better agricultural crop plants.

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