Plant Tissue Culture

Plant Tissue Culture - The conventional breeding methods are the most widely used for crop improvement. But in certain situations, these methods have to be supplemented with plant tissue culture techniques either to increase their efficiency or to be able to achieve the objective, which is not possible through the conventional methods.

The term tissue culture is commonly used in a very wide sense to include in vitro culture of plant cells, tissues as well as organs. But in a strict sense, tissue culture denotes the in vitro cultivation of plant cells in an unorganised mass, e.g., callus cultures.

Another term, cell culture is used for in vitro culture of single or relatively small groups of plant cells, e.g., suspension cultures. But in general, the term tissue culture is applied to both callus and suspension cultures, and cell culture is often used for callus culture as well.

When organised structures like root tips, shoot tips, embryos, etc. are cultured in vitro to obtain their development as organised structures, it is called organ cultures. In this book, the term tissue culture is used in its broad sense to denote aseptic culture of plant cells, tissues, and organs.