Advantages and Disadvantages of Tissue Culture Plants

Tissue culture is an important life science technique because it allows researchers to isolate cells and experiment on them for specific purposes. Tissue culture has been a useful area of research relating to plant development. But let’s focus on a specific area of tissue culture known as plant tissue culture. Plant tissue culture is the growth of identical plant cells, tissues, or organs on artificial intelligence. This is mostly done under a sterile environment and controllable physical conditions. This is a popular tool for researchers and commercial users alike.

Plant propagation is the ability to make new plants with the use of existing plants. Most people consider propagation as separating plants or putting leaves in water or soil; however, a common type of propagation is tissue culture. But what is tissue culture? Also known as micropropagation, this is the making of new plants on a nutrient media under aseptic conditions. During the process of tissue culture, the leaves stems, buds, and other essential parts of the plant can grow into a complete clone of the mother plant. Common examples of culture plants include orchids. It's important to conduct tissue culture under aseptic conditions to prevent the growth of fungi on the nutrient media. This is one of the main worries of growers who practice tissue culture at home. However, if you plan on doing tissue culture at home, it's best to sterilize plant material and tools. Regardless the focus of this article is to examine the advantages and disadvantages of tissue culture plants.

Advantages of Tissue Culture Plants

• Micropropagation

As mentioned earlier, micropropagation is a tissue culture method that helps to generate plants without the use of sexual reproduction or seed formation techniques. The newly generated plants are genetically undifferentiated to their parents and are known as clones. Micropropagation is done conventionally through cuttings, budding, grafting, corms, tubers, or other vegetative propagules. While these conventional techniques involve the use of physical labor and environmental conditions, their success rate is usually low. Micropropagation is useful since it doesn’t involve physical labor and it's also done in a controlled environment. This technique also leads to the generation of multiple plants in little or no time. Moreover, since micropropagation is done under regulated environmental conditions, it is not season-dependent.

• Production of virus-free plants

Often, crop plants get affected by viruses which leads to the deaths of plants and huge losses for the grower in terms of yield. Virus infection is a serious issue especially for vegetatively propagated plants, because it will damage the entire species that’s being cultured. Therefore, it's important to produce virus-free plants so that the yield and quality of vegetatively propagated plants should not decrease. Surprisingly, viruses are unevenly distributed across the plant body. Parts of the plant free from viruses include apical or axillary meristems. Thus, a very small part of apical meristems can work as an explant to trigger cultures to produce virus-free plants. The success of this method is unmatched as it has been used to clone propagated crops, such as sugarcane, banana, and potato.

• Production of secondary metabolites

Plants usually generate numerous compounds and while some of these compounds are not meant for its survival, they help with the plant’s interaction with the environment. These compounds are known as secondary metabolites. These compounds work to defend the plant against biotic and abiotic stress conditions. Growers can use plant cell or tissue-based cultures as a source of secondary metabolites. Hairy root system generates high-quality secondary metabolites which can be useful for commercial industries.

Disadvantages of Tissue Culture Plants

• High cost of production

Tissue culture can’t be possible without the use of specialized equipment and well-trained personnel. All these tools are expensive which not every farmer can afford. Thus, smallholder farmers and horticulturists find difficulties practicing tissue culture.  

• Adaptation Defect

Tissue-cultured plants may find difficulties in adapting to the outside world. This can be disadvantageous for growers if the newly acquired plants cannot survive in outdoor conditions.

Conclusion

By now we know that the tissue culture technique allows the growth and study of cells or tissues in a sterile environment. By knowing the advantages and disadvantages of tissue-cultured plants, you become more informed of what to do and what not to do when it comes to using this technology.