I Cloned This Plant 500 Times

Summary

In this video, Laur shares her journey of cloning a plant through tissue culture, a process of rapidly growing plants in a sterile environment. She demonstrates how she cloned a single plant into 500 copies using multiplication media, explaining the necessary ingredients and equipment. Laur details each stage of the process, from transferring plants to subculturing them, and offers tips for anyone interested in home tissue culture. She also discusses common misconceptions about tissue culture and the benefits of using it in plant propagation, while emphasizing the potential of plant tissue culture for scale and uniformity.

Takeaways

• 😀 Tissue culture is a process used to rapidly clone plants in a sterile environment, which can be done even at home with the right tools and knowledge.
• 🌱 Laur began with one plant from a lab in Thailand, cloning it repeatedly, eventually producing around 500 copies of that original plant.
• 🔬 Tissue culture involves the use of a gel-like medium that provides nutrients and hormones to help plants grow and multiply.
• 💡 The media used in tissue culture contains important ingredients like MS salts, sucrose (sugar), and hormones like BAP to stimulate cell division.
• ⚙️ A still airbox or laminar flow hood is essential to reduce contamination during tissue culture transfers.
• 🧪 Creating tissue culture media at home involves using ingredients such as MS, sucrose, and agar, with pH levels adjusted for optimal plant growth.
• 💧 The multiplication media helps plant cells divide faster, which results in more shoots and more clones in less time.
• 🍃 Plants in tissue culture need to be subcultured every 6-8 weeks to refresh the media and avoid issues like hyperhydricity (overhydration).
• 🌿 When subculturing, it's important to separate clumps of plants carefully to ensure healthy growth and prevent damage.
• 💰 Tissue culture can scale rapidly, producing hundreds or even thousands of genetically identical plants, which can be sold at a profit.
• 📉 The tissue culture method is particularly useful for plants that don't produce seeds easily, such as filodendrons, ensuring genetic consistency in the clones.

Q & A

What is plant tissue culture?

Plant tissue culture is a process of rapidly cloning plants in a sterile environment. It involves using plant tissue to grow new plants without soil, typically in a gel-like media that provides the necessary nutrients and hormones for growth.

How does tissue culture help in plant cloning?

Tissue culture works by using multiplication media that contains hormones to encourage plant cells to divide rapidly. This leads to the production of multiple plant shoots in a short period, resulting in many clones from a single plant.

What is the purpose of a still airbox in tissue culture?

A still airbox is used to reduce the risk of contamination by minimizing air movement. When opening a culture vessel, contaminants like dust, bacteria, or fungus can enter and spoil the culture, so the still airbox helps keep the environment sterile.

What is the role of BAP (Benzylaminopurine) in tissue culture?

BAP is a plant hormone (cytokinin) used in tissue culture to promote cell division and shoot formation. It is especially important for the multiplication of plants like monsteras and philodendrons.

Why is agar used in the tissue culture media?

Agar is used to solidify the tissue culture media. It turns the liquid media into a gel, providing a stable environment for plant tissues to grow. Without agar, the media would remain liquid, which is used in some specialized types of tissue culture but not for the standard media.

How do you make multiplication media at home for tissue culture?

To make multiplication media, you need ingredients like MS (Murashige and Skoog) salts, sucrose (sugar), BAP, and agar. These are mixed with distilled water, the pH is adjusted, and the media is sterilized through pressure cooking before being used to grow plants.

What is the difference between multiplication media and rooting media?

Multiplication media promotes rapid cell division and shoot formation using hormones like BAP, while rooting media is used for encouraging the growth of roots in plants and typically contains auxins instead of cytokinins.

Why don't tissue culture plants need roots before being acclimated to soil?

The roots that develop in tissue culture usually die when the plant is moved to soil. The goal of the rooting stage in tissue culture is to grow the plant larger and give it the best chance of acclimating to soil, where it will develop a new root system.

What is temporary immersion in tissue culture?

Temporary immersion involves fully immersing the plants in liquid media once or twice a day for a few minutes. This technique can help with faster growth but is not essential for growing plants in tissue culture.

What factors affect the cost of tissue culture plants like philodendrons?

The cost of tissue culture plants is influenced by factors like the size of the plant, its rarity, the time it takes to grow, and the quality of the plant. For example, a philodendron red Anderson might sell for $16 to $40 depending on its size and maturity.