Plant Tissue Culture

The term “Plant tissue culture” broadly refers to the in vitro cultivation of plant parts under aseptic conditions. Such parts as meristems, apices, axillary buds. Young inflorescence, leaves, stems, and roots have been cultured. A controlled aseptic environment and suitable nutrient medium are the two chief requirements for successful tissue culture. These essential nutrients include inorganic salts, a carbon and energy source, vitamins and growth regulators.

The basic technology can be divided into five classes, depending on the material being used: Callus, organ, meristem, and protoplast and cell culture. The technique of embryo, ovule, ovary, anther and microspore culture are used and can yield genotypes that cannot easily be produced by conventional methodology.

Brief History of Plant Tissue Culture

It was Gottlieb Haberland (1902) who in the first decade of this century pioneered the field of plant tissue culture. His idea was to achieve continued cell division in explanted tissue grown on nutrient medium. Following the discovery and use of auxins, the work of Gautherel, Nobecourt and White ushered in the second phase of plant tissue culture over 30 years ago. These and other workers determined the nutritional and hormonal requirements of the cultured plant tissues. It was observed that the whole plant could be successfully regenerated from undifferentiated tissues or even single cells in culture.

Papid advances in diverse aspect of plant culture have been made during the last few years and plant tissue culture techniques have been extensively applied to agriculture and industry. Condensed Cronology of Important Development in the Plant Tissue Culture:

Year	Worker	Contribution
1902	C.Haberlant	First attempt to culture isolated plant cells in vitro on artificial medium
1922	WJ Robbins and W. Kotte	Culture of isolated roots ( for short periods) ( organ culture)
1934	P R White	Demonstration of indefinite culture of tomato roots ( long period)
1939	R J Gautheret and P Nobecourt	First long term plant tissue culture of callus, involving explants of cambail tissues isolated from carrot.
1939	P R White	Callus culture of tobacco tumor tissues from intersepcific hybird of Nicotina glaucum X N.longsdorffi
1941	J Van Overbeek	Discovery of nutritional value of liquid endosperm of coconut for culture of isolated carrot embryo.
1942	P R White and A C Braun	Experiments on crownn-gall and tumor formation in plants, growth of bacteria free crown-gall tissues.
1948	A Caplan and F C Stewart	Use of coconut milk plus 2, 4-D fro proliferation of cultured carrot and potato tissues
1950	G Morel	Culture of monocot tissues using coconut milk.
1953	W H Muir	Inoculation of callus pieces in liquid medium can give a suspension of single cells amenable tosubculture. Development of technique for culture of single isolated cells.
1953	W Tulecke	Haploid culture from pollen of gymnosperm ( Ginkgo)
1955	C O Miller, F Skeog and others	Discovery of cytokinins. E.g. Kinetin, or potent cell division factor.
1955	E ball	Culture of gymnosperm tissues ( Sequoia)
1957	F Skoog and C O Miller	Hypotheses that shoot and root initiation in cultured callus is regulated by the proportion of auxins and cytokinins in the culture medium.
1960	E C Cocking	Enzymatic isolation and culture of protoplast.
1960	G Morel	Development of shoot apex culture technique.
1964	G Morel	Use of modified shoot apex technique for orchid proportion.
1966	S G Guha and S C Maheshwari	Cultured anthers and pollen and produce haploid embryos.
1974	J P Nitsch	Culture of microspores of Datura and Nicotina, to double the chromosome number and to harvest seed from homozygous diploid plants just within five months.
1978	G Melchers	Production of somatic hybrids from attached to plasmid vectors into naked plant protoplast.
1983	K A Barton , W J Brill and J H Dodds Bengochea	Insertion of foreign genes attached to plasmid vectors into naked plant protoplast.
1983	M D Chilton	Production of transformed tobacco plants following single cell transformation or gene insertion.