Conservation of Plant Genetic Resources

Beyond generating individual plants for research or commercial use, tissue culture techniques also give plant scientists tools to conserve genetic diversity itself. This section covers two complementary conservation strategies: germplasm conservation, which maintains living genetic material such as seeds, pollen or tissue in a usable, viable state, and cryopreservation, which suspends biological material in a dormant state at extremely low temperature so it can, in principle, be stored indefinitely. Both are essential to plant breeding programmes, to s …