Micropropagation in Plant Tissue Culture

 Micropropagation in Plant Tissue Culture. Before understanding what is micropropagation we must understand what is meant by plant tissue culture. Plant Tissue Culture is a technique of growing a plant asexually in a laboratory under sterile conditions. While growing the plant this plant is not grown in soil but it is grown using artificial media. Now that we have understood the meaning of Plant Tissue Culture it will be easy to understand what is micropropagation. Micropropagation is the technique or we simple might say that it tells us the stages by which the growth of plant take place under in vitro conditions.

Micropropagation in Plant Tissue Culture

 Clonal propagation/ micropropagation in plant tissue culture refers to the process of asexual reproduction by the multiplication of genetically identical copies of individual plants. 

Cornell University botanist Frederick Campion Steward pioneered micropropagation and plant tissue culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

ln-vitro clonal propagation through tissue culture is also referred to as Micropropagation.

Micropropagation helps in developing the plants asexually via plant tissue culture. 

Micropropagation consists of five stages, starting with the Stage 0 and ending with Stage lV. given below are the stages of micropropogation

Stages of Micropropagation in Plant Tissue Culture:-

Stage 0= This stage involves the selection of  the Mother plant and growing them for about three months under controlled conditions. This ensures disease free plant are grown.

Stage I= ln this stage, the initiation of culture takes place. Selection of appropriate explants for culture initation is done. The most commonly used explants are organs, tips of shoot, and axillary buds. The chosen explant plant is surface sterilized before its use Culture is established.

Stage ll= It mainly involves multiplication of shoots or rapid embryo formation from explant.

Stage lll= In stage 3 the shoots are transferred on the rooting medium, for the multiplication of roots, or the shoots are directly planted in soil to develop roots. ln-vitro rooting of shoots is mainly preferred while simultaneously handling a large number of species.

Stage lV = It involves the establishment of plantlets in the soil. This is done by transferring the plantlets of stage lll from laboratory to the environment of a greenhouse.

 In stage l =  Addition of growth regulators such as cytokinins like kinetin, BA (6-benzyladenine), and auxins like NAA (Naphthalene acetic acid) or IBA (indole acetic acid) will support the growth and development of the plant while carrying out stage 1 of micropropagation.

 In stage Il = For the shoot development, high levels of cytokinins such as kinetin, BA (6-benzyladenine) is required for this purpose. Due to the addition of these cytokinins growth of shoots occurs in plants. 

In stage lll = For rooting of shoots and the further growth of plantlet, the root formation is facilitated by low cytokinin and high auxin concentration. in this stage, there is no addition of cytokinin and only auxins such as NAA (Naphthalene acetic acid) or IBA (indole acetic acid) are added so as to facilitate the growth of only root in stage 3.

With the help of all the above growth regulators and adding them in variable concentrations in different stages of  micropropagation it helps in the growth of callus to shoot to root formation in artificial media under sterile conditions 

Applications of Micropropagation in Plant Tissue Culture

1)  High rate of plant propagation= Through micropropagation, a large number of plants can be grown from a small piece of plant tissue within a short period of time.

2) Another advantage is that micropropagation can be carried out throughout the year, irrespective of the variations in the seasons.

3) The small-sized propagules obtained in micropropagation can be easily stored for many years (germplasm storage), and transported across the international boundaries as they are very small in size and easy to handle.

4)Helps in producing disease-free plants. Meristem cultures are generally employed to develop pathogen-free plants because meristem tissue generally shows rapid growth and due to which the virus and pathogen cant grow in those tissues due to which meristem tissue always remain disease free. Micropropagation is successfully used for the production of virus-free plants.

5) Production of seeds in some crops= Micropropagation, through axillary bud proliferation method, is suitable for seed production in some plants e.g. cauliflower.

6) Cost-effective process=  Micropropagation requires minimum amount of growing space. Thus, a millions of plant species can be maintained inside culture vials in a small room in a nursery. The production cost is low, particularly in developing countries (like India) where the manpower and labor charges are low.

7) Automated Micropropagation=  Some workers employ robots (in place of laborers) for the micropropagation, and this further reduces the production cost of plants.

8) Micropropagation helps in producing various clones of a healthy plant.

9) With the help of micropropogation we can grow hybrid plants from hybrid cells as it becomes really hard to grow these hybrid plants via conventional plant growth methods as these methods do not support the growth of unusual hybrid plants (unnatural plants or the plants that are not present in nature naturally).

Conclusion

Now we know what is Micropropagation in Plant Tissue Culture. First, we saw a little introduction about what is plant tissue culture then we understood what is micropropagation, then we went through what is the definition of micropropagation, but if I would like to simply put- micropropagation means it discusses the simple procedure of how the plant tissue culture steps are carried out from stage 0 to stage 4. And also discussed what all growth regulators we use in each stage so that the plant will grow and the procedure of growing the plant will move further in stages of the micropropagation technique. We also studied some advantages of growing a plant via micropropagation rather than conventional plant growing methods. So let it be anther culture, meristem culture, organogenesis in plants, embryogenesis in plants, pollen culture, callus culture, or any kind of culture the plant will always follow or will be grown through the above-mentioned micropropagation stages in order to grow into a full-fledged plant.