Applications of Plant Tissue Culture
Plant tissue culture techniques have several applications such as:
i.
Improved hybrids production through somatic hybridization.
ii.
Somatic embryoids can be encapsulated into synthetic seeds
(synseeds). These encapsulated seeds or synthetic seeds help in conservation of
plant biodiversity.
iii.
Production of disease resistant plants through meristem and shoot
tip culture.
iv.
Production of stress resistant plants like herbicide tolerant,
heat tolerant plants.
v.
Micropropagation technique to obtain large numbers of plantlets of
both crop and tree species useful in forestry within a short span of time and
all through the year.
vi.
Production of secondary metabolites from cell culture utilized in
pharmaceutical, cosmetic and food industries.
Somaclonal variations:
Somatic variations found in plants regenerated in vitro (i.e. variations found
in leaf, stem, root, tuber or propagule)
Gametoclonal
variations: Gametophytic variations found in plants regenerated in vitro gametic
origin (i.e. variations found in gametes and gametophytes)
Micropropagation of plants at industrial level maintains high
standards of homogeneity in plants like pineapple, banana, strawberry and
potato.
Artificial seeds or synthetic seeds (synseeds) are produced by
using embryoids (somatic embryos) obtained through in vitro culture. They may
even be derived from single cells from any part of the plant that later divide
to form cell mass containing dense cytoplasm, large nuclceus, starch grains,
proteins, and oils etc., To prepare the artificial seeds different inert
materials are used for coating the somatic embryoids like agrose and sodium
alginate.
Advantages of Artificial seeds
Artificial seeds have many advantages over the true seeds
·
Millions of artificial seeds can be produced at any time at low
cost.
·
They provide an easy method to produce genetically engineered
plants with desirable traits.
·
It is easy to test the genotype of plants.
·
They can potentially stored for long time under cryopreservation
method.
·
Artificial seeds produce identical plants
·
The period of dormancy of artificial seeds is greatly reduced,
hence growth is faster with a shortened life cycle.
The field grown plants like perennial crops, usually are infected
by variety of pathogens like fungi, bacteria, mycoplasma, viruses which cause
considerable economic losses. Chemical methods can be used to control fungal
and bacterial pathogens, but not viruses generally.
Shoot meristem tip culture is the method to produce virus-free
plants, because the shoot meristem tip is always free from viruses.
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