What is Plant tissue culture?

This is the easiest and the most widely adopted of the biotechnology systems. It the oldest and the most basic of them all. Its based on the fact that plants consist of totipotent cells. It entails the culture of plant parts/tissues (roots, leaves, petioles, stems, inflouresences etc)in artificial media under aseptic conditions. Tissue culture has many advantages including

• Production of clean planting materials;
• Increased productivity (Material can be availed all year round since production is not dependent on weather)
• en masse production (an individual explant can give rise to thousands of seedlings)
• Production of plants of higher viguor
• Uniform maturity of plants/products; one can easily plan for a market.
• Final produce (seedlings) is true to type.
• Enable embryo rescue

To be able to do tissue culture, one needs some basic equipments including a weighing balance, a hot plate, an autoclave, a lamina flow hood, a water distiller, an oven and a growth chamber (growth room). The main disadvantages of plant tissue culture include the fact that it is a very costly venture, it is labor intensive and it requires trained personnel to man the production unit.

From http://wikieducator.org/Plant_Biotechnology