Tissue culture: A bright future for plant technology
- Kate Dirga
- Jul 13, 2022
- 2 min read
Did you know that there is technology on this planet that can multiply plants at a fast speed? This technology is called tissue culture, and many scientists believe that it can save the world! The Covid-19 pandemic, climate change and war between Russia and Ukraine are causing rapid increase in food prices and shortages of food supplies around the world. Tissue culture can be the solution to the global food crisis.
What is tissue culture?
Tissue culture is the cultivation and multiplication of plant cells, tissues, or organs on a media. The media used to cultivate these plants are specially formulated, meaning that they have to be made using the right amount of hormones, nutrients and glucose. Tissue culture includes learning about plants, experimenting with the right hormones to add in the media for accelerated growth and finding out ways to keep the plant sterile during planting. Under the right conditions, an entire plant can be regenerated rapidly only from a single cell. It means we can produce plants at a much faster rate than the conventional method.
Why do we need tissue culture?
For many developing countries, tissue culture is an essential technology used to generate disease-free and high quality media to produce many uniform plants. Since the plants are grown in the laboratory, the temperature is adjusted to the plants’ needs. For this reason, changes in season will not affect the success rate of plant reproduction significantly. Normally, fruit-producing plants will not survive in extreme climates (such as winter), but with tissue culture, plants are multiplied in the lab, so they won’t be influenced by the change in weather.
The typical temperature for tissue culture is around 15-30°C, and can be controlled by air conditioning inside the lab. In simple words, with tissue culture technology, countries with four seasons will be able to enjoy fresh vegetables and fruits all year long since crops are planted indoors. Tissue culture can even be used to multiply medicinal plants that can cure illnesses, such as viruses, injury or even allergies!
In conclusion, tissue culture can be the key to solve issues that humankind encounters on a global scale. This method has been around for more than 30 years, so it is definitely worth deepening our knowledge of tissue culture. Who knows? In the future, this technology may even produce plants that boost our immunity against the COVID-19 virus!
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