Applications of Plant Tissue Culture

Plant tissue culture techniques translate directly into a wide range of practical applications. The book lists six major ones: producing improved hybrids through somatic hybridisation; encapsulating somatic embryoids into synthetic seeds (synseeds), which helps conserve plant biodiversity; producing disease-resistant plants through meristem and shoot-tip culture; producing stress-resistant plants, including herbicide-tolerant and heat-tolerant varieties; using micropropagation to raise large numbers of genetically uniform plantlets of both crop and tree species for forestry, quickly and year-round; and producing secondary metabolites from cell culture for use in the pharmaceutical, cosmetic and food industries. Because plants regenerated in vitro do not always come out genetically identical to their parent, the book also defines two related kinds of variation seen in tissue-cultured material: somaclonal variations are somatic variations found in in-vitro-regenerated plants themselves (seen in their leaf, stem, root, tuber …