Q.What are the outcomes of application of plant tissue culture ?

Tissue culture gives us clones, virus-free stock, gene banks, haploids, hybrids beyond normal crosses, and even lab-grown drugs.

1. Micropropagation -- rapid, large-scale clonal (vegetative) multiplication of genetically identical, disease-free plantlets from a single explant; important for commercially valuable, ornamental, and hard-to-propagate species (e.g. orchids, banana).
2. Production of virus-free plants -- via meristem-tip culture, since the apical meristem is usually free of viral particles even in an infected plant; important for vegetatively propagated crops such as potato, sugarcane, and banana.
3. Germplasm conservation -- long-term storage of plant genetic resources (via slow-growth culture or cryopreservation), particularly valuable for rare, endangered, or recalcitrant-seeded species.
4. Production of haploid plants -- via anther or pollen culture (androgenesis), used to rapidly generate pure, homozygous breeding lines for plant breeding programmes.
5. Somatic hybridisation -- protoplast fusion between different (even sexually incompatible) species or genera, producing hybrid plants beyond the reach of conventional sexual crossing.
6. Genetic transformation -- tissue culture supplies the regeneration system needed to recover whole transgenic plants after introducing a foreign gene (e.g. via Agrobacterium or the gene gun). …